A couple of years ago on the old Rhino forum, I was having problems with hull surfaces that were coming from Maxsurf. It uses stacked points to create a chine in a hull surface. With three or four stacked control points you get a nice crisp corner and then you can spread them out as you move forward from the transom and that will make that hard chine gradually soften and become indistinct on the surface. That can cause odd things in Rhino and I was griping about it not understanding that stacked points does create what it termed ‘degenerate surface’. Some well meaning but rather brusque posted called my hull surfaces ‘degenerate’ and I took it somewhat personally until I googled the term and found that he was correct. With those Maxsurf chined surfaces, I found that I could split them on the isocurves at the hard apex of the chine and then rejoin them as a polysurface af ‘shrinking to edges’ to get rid of the extra control points.
You are right about spheres though and I’ve learned to try and avoid 2 rail sweeps to a point like you mention. Best to avoid ‘singularities’.
Hm… interesting text format there
I understand what you mean and for many situations one should avoid it, but for others it’s the way to go. Basically the user needs to know his craft. So don’t use it if it gives you trouble down the road.
Right about knowing your craft. I don’t use MaxSurf anymore. I was upset that they stopped supporting Macs but that forced me to switch to WIndows and I might have never taken up Rhino until Marlin made that possible on the Mac. Not sure
what
happened
on
the
formatting.
Imagine that you have drawn a human head. The head is looking straight at you. You see its face. Now you want to see its left side or its right side. The only way to see its left or right side is to rotate the head. You cannot just rotate the view to look at its left side or its right side. In other words, Rhino cannot rotate the view sideways (left or right). It can only rotate the view vertically (up or down). There is no Rhino command that can rotate the view sideways. Right mouse button dragging cannot do it. TiltView command cannot do it. RotateView command cannot do it. Changing camera target cannot do it.
Assuming your modeled face looks at you straight in the Front viewport there should be no problem rotating the view to see the left and right side in Perspective. My guess is that you placed you object to “look at you straight” in the Top viewport.
Some 3D packages do have another orbiting style, called “trackball” (mostly Sub-D modelers), but in CAD world “turntable” is more popular.
Helvetosaur wrote: Either use the RMB (right mouse button, I guess - A.N.) or arrow keys in the Perspective viewport, or press
Ctrl+Shift+ RMB or arrow keys in the Front view to rotate it…
Clarification: You cannot do it in one step. You have to align the Z axis first, so that it points to up and down of the viewport (the screen). (Turntable command also rotates the view about Z axis only.)
I don’t get it. In your first post, you are talking about not being able to rotate sideways. Now you say the “view only rotates about the Z-Axis” - which is “sideways” as far as I know…
This orientation of the Z axis is true only in Front viewport and Right viewport. It may or may not be true in Perspective viewport.
Maybe “tumbling” is better way to describe this apparent movement. Imagine that you hold a stone in your hand and you are trying to tumble it. You can tumble the stone about any axis, but tumbling the view in Rhino depends on the initial orientation of the Z axis.
Try SHIFT+ALT+RMB
you can then turn around the Z-axis of the view. If you get the cursor near the edge of a viewport the rotation is in steps of 5 degrees.
Total freedom of movement: all six axes! Pan, zoom, rotate separately … or at the same time. Wow. It’s fun, too! I never model without it. Now on sale at amazon stores everywhere.
The easiest way to accurately rotate views in Rhino is IMO using the CPlane.
There are tools that let you set up the CPlane exactly as you like.
Then the Plan command orientates the view on the CPlane.
Yes, if you orient CPlane vertically, than you can tumble the view sideways in Perspective view with the right mouse button, but there should be easier way to do it.
…not doing what you’re wanting?
to me, it seems that’s exactly what you’re wanting to do but you’re still saying otherwise.
as in, i’m confused about what you want to be able to do.
