Btw this was something I proposed in this forum due to my daily works in Icem 3 years ago. Not saying it was me giving the hint in this direction, but if it was me, it is indeed a sign that the community has influence.
The example I gave with ICEM was just to make clear, that the demands on a software, no matter who is targeted, is not always as obvious. Furthermore this might be incorrect. I would say Rhino tries to target as many people as possible. Larger corporations doing CAD also have many Rhino licenses for special purposes.
Alias has a huge improvement in the last 10 years. Rhino and Alias were close during the Rhino 4 times (which means Alias was still not so good 12-14 years ago), but recent releases of Alias are quite powerful thanks to their constant improvement of modeling and analysis tools. That makes Alias very desirable for those who do product design of any kind, along with automotive design.
Rhino has much, much better user interface, camera control and customization of everything, but it also needs better NURBS surfacing tools.
Rhino tries to be âthe boy for everythingâ, i.e. offering universal tools for many tasks not necessarily related to NURBS surfacing, but that also makes it less competitive in any of those directions due to the smaller developer team. For example, AutoCAD still has superior drafting and dimensions tools. Alias has much better surfacing tools. Blender has an awesome rendering engine. 3ds Max, Katia and Fusion 360 have very well developed Catmull-Clark subdivision and modeling tools (sorf of SubD in Rhino 7).
Alias is a specialized tool with strong emphasis on automotive and product design. Again I personally agree, but Rhino also has many users being architects, craftsman, jewelery designer, fashion designer, furnature designer, naval engineers, cgi specialists, hobbiests even my local carpenter uses Rhino.
And no, they donât need to manually match a corner blend to perfection with a deviation analysis.
EDIT: I havenât read carefully enough. Yes this is the dilemma. But its good that there is such a versatile tool out there, which is also very affordable for small businesses.
Iâve been asking for the same things for years: improvement of Nurbs modeling tools and analysis (Blend srf, match, etc.). Current improvements are weak and too slow, many years to add a new option ⌠(VSR tools are the reference Rhino should strive for).
They are not criticisms, but findings, no attacks! Rhino could be a wonderful tool, more so than many other expensive and cumbersome software.
Even on that forum I have read multiple people saying they are afraid to upgrade to Rhino 6 or Rhino 7, because they donât want to lose the great modeling and analysis tools they currently have with Rhino 5 + VRS. This speaks volumes. Several years ago I also used to work in a company with VSR for Rhino 5 and it was fantastic upgrade over the default Rhino modeling tools. My favourite was the âLight linesâ zebra analysis, and specially its alternative set to 7 colourful stripes that were NOT view dependent, i.e. they were always static and âlockedâ to the surface geometry just like a texture. Thatâs an extremely powerful tool for spotting even the slightest imperfections in the surface flow and continuity. Sadly, Rhino 7 lacks it.
I still keep one screen-shot of VSR that I made in the past and it reminds me of how useful were those light lines.
I think you can misuse the hdri background on a highly reflective material to apply a static zebra hdri image. A bad hack, but this should make it. You could even modify the amount of lines, by using u and v repetition values. Donât know how to exactly to do this in Rhino, but in other applications this solved it for me.