I had posted this as a reply to a different thread. And it’s better placed on its own.
I think Rhino V7 Wip will be ship-ready once they wrap up a few things:
fix BoxEdit (for real, all the way, fully tested and validated, with a zero-error-ever ™️).
add symmetry (1/2/3 axis and radial) on a per-object level
get Mesh subobjects (vertex/edge/poly face) to work fast and intuitively like in a professional tool
get all SubD functions in display, analysis, cages and output of tools working
fix fillets
fix snapshots so they don’t wreck your files and don’t turn your computer into MolassOS
get GH2 better integrated in Rhino <> GH UI canvases, file management and visual toggles
fix stroke/thickness scaling in custom Rez viewcaptures
fix material assignment and management to be at least 70% as fast as Keyshot. (See my benchmark vídeos on this with a car scene)
get Bongo 3 with FBX/ABC import/export/live-link
fix block management and editing
and some easy fluff for architects, like a font or some text crap. Or toilets libraries/whatevs.
Then they are totally ready to ship.
This should be 6-9 months of work if they stay focused. All all work with a clearly and unequivocally managed and prioritized UX/functionality backlog. Right?
That’s an ambitious list.
A bit unrealistic but good nonetheless.
Since you are aren’t involved in the specifics of Rhino development, or the other things we’re working on you’re not aware of, I’m amused by your estimation of how long this work might take.
My father would call it “atmospheric assimilation”.
We need much better documentation! We waste our time and Pascal Golay’s time due to mediocre Rhino documentation. I helped Kelvin fix many bugs, but there is still a few dozen errors and about 100 omissions.
I think the documentation is still certainly good, don’t get me wrong, just sometimes requires digging. But yes, I too have noticed some tools where an option isn’t explained well or could be better explained with a pictorial example/gif.
Are there any surface modelling updates expected/desired for V7? As someone who’s basic-intermediate level at best, it’s hard to know what is missing (what tools do the big boys and pros know of that exist to do a job better in an Alias et al, but aren’t available in Rhino). I’ve seen people write about better matching and so on, but what does that look like? (think the unthinkable)
I think no one is McNeel is confusing my feedback with discontent.
I’m a grumpily happy customer. In fact I have to buy two more licenses next week. I’ve seen our CloudZoo license manager going into ‘red level’ of usage and it makes me twitch. So my ODC works both ways for them.
I’ve explored and continued to explore all the other options to better tools and nothing comes close to Rhino in terms of managing projects that include design concepts, visualization, animation, documentation, computational aspects, design production geometry (tooling ready), and managing data for VR pipelines.
Sure we have to do a lot of SubD modeling and UV in Modo, V5’s T-splines. Fillets, direct modeling and defeaturing edits in Fusion and Spaceclaim (only simple prototyping stuff, they are useless for ‘Design Surfaces’ where hand-work in Rhino is the only viable option. We also have to deal with terribly badly integrated Octane or buggy Vray for good renderings, and jump through hoops to do round-trip imports/exports with our clients to maintain assembly structures… but this is the best alternative in the entire market.
Also if we ever hit a dead-end (very rarely) to deliver work to our clients, direct help from McNeel is only a few minutes/hours away.
Probably there is at least one year left to V7.
In Rhino 7 I would like to see implement of all the small user requests and feedback which are widely appreciatetd and 4 years old. 5 years old seems to be a nice number for the absolute deadline.
Bricscad Shape snd Sketchup use polygonal modeling. In theory you could do that in Rhino if they added a few tools. In practice I doubt that will ever happens because they require a wholistic approach to UX and workflow that in the McNeel culture just doesn’t not exists.
You cannot create a seamless experience like those by clustering a bunch of YouTrack requests, plus links of user requests/testimonials/discussions and point them to a developer and say: “Do your thing with that!”
Moi3D is more like Rhino’s direct editing. This is also an area with the Rhino team did a bit of work a few years ago, but what they have only works in 100% planar-only polysurfaces. You can try to ‘push a face’ on models that have non-planar surfaces (even things as geometrically simple as extrusions and cylinders) but you are risking completely destroying your model. And many times not even knowing it until you are way more downstream later. Especially if you model with isocurves turned off. Currently this is more of a direct-destruction tool than direct-modeling tool.
I don’t expect these things to change in the near (next 5 years) future.
Note that while Moi3D uses the .3dm OpenNurbs file format, it does not use the same geometric core library (as far as I know). Last I checked it was based on the IntegrityWare solid modeling kernel. So there are some things that may be possible in Moi3D that are not in Rhino and vice-versa.
I think Integrity Ware is extremely limited. We all know how badly all those PowerBooleans and PowerFillets plugins for Rhino worked. They only worked in cubes and spheres. Never worked in real world situations and any of our actual industrial design models.
Same can be said about all the direct modeling is Spaceclaim, Fusion360 and Onshape. They are all useless for complex geometry, which makes sense for them since you can’t really model complex topology in those tools anyway.
I don’t expect direct modeling/direct editing to be a magic tool, the entire industry knows how limited those tools are. However I think Rhino could really spend some effort in at least be as good as they are for simple geometry including extrusions, 2-degree surfaces, cylinders, fillets, etc. It would help a lot to clean up and edit internal components, block out rib structures, and work on features for prototypes and jigs/fixtures.
If not more direct modelling tools at leas a better inference system.
Right now it is impossible to draw a line (par example) at the intersection of two cubes. Just a basic example but very useful feature. To be able to draw a line there, or to snap an object to that intersection, first I need to select both cubes, do an ‘Intersect’ command, draw the line, delete the ‘intersect’ lines. Quite a lot of unnecessary extra steps, when in the above mentioned software’s, you can do-it straight away.
Hopefully to implement this feature don’t require a lot of resources from McNeel side, but definitely will make a much faster and pleasant experience to work in Rhino.
Honestly Rhino 6 has been so nice all I really would want is faster raytracing. The layout is great, fillet works 1,000,000,000X better than Rhino 4. Other than a bug with nvidia drivers making the texture black some times its hard to complain.
