Why are Class-A surfaces such a big deal for cars, but not industrial design / architecture?

Right, thanks- it is not particular to chordal fillets, is what I was trying to establish… it is not…

But I understand the gripe - you’d like, apart from any interactive control, the acceleration to remain more constant- the right hand example (Left is current) .

Correct?

RH-54486 More progressive

-Pascal

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Preach

@thomas_parel YES YES YES! I use Extrapolate. All. Day. Long. You’re showing all the reasons why I’m still on VSR. Also - I seriously cannot believe it, but I NEVER realized you should move your surface blend edges back into your surface. Thank you for that!

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Yes exactly!

But there are at least 2 ways of achieving an even spacing. One way is chordal spacing of CVs, the other is equidistant spacing of CVs.

How does Rhino Rhino handle this?

Hello - right now it shoots for even spacing from the edge - but there are other ways available - it is on the pile… actually has been for a while - and the developer will have a look - thanks.

-Pascal

Small steps… some things are finally underway if you scroll down in that thread.

Don’t forget consistency between tools to! The filleting/blend tools are a disaster in similar, yet inconsistent options, and I keep forgetting that Rhino almost never cares about edge alignment, which is crazy to me.

Yup. I don’t think many understood what I meant here and here either.

But then again, since so few people bought VSR compared to the expensive architecture and jewelry plugins, I guess it’s sadly evident why it’s not a priority for McNeel (and honestly, I’d rather have robust block editing tools first, because they are the true showstopper… but now I digress).

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For what it’s worth, I agree 100% with Sky and his comments.

-Numerical validation is a big one for me as well. As an example Zebra may show a small error, but how do you determine if it’s acceptable, or if you need to spend more time trying to improve it? Numerical analysis let’s you determine this in an easy and reliable manner.

-Better align would be great. I have gone as far as manually matching control points on single span primary surfaces, but it’s time consuming and most certainly not alway clear what the best approach is/would be.

-The better align tool should also allow for an easy and intuitive interface to match 4 edges with different continuity. Actually the UI implementation of XNurbs is fantastic. You feed it 4 edges and set continuity to what you want. XNurbs is a great tool for surface creation, but a similar implementation for surface matching would be very welcome for me.

And I’m like Sky, I keep V5 around just for VSR Shape modeling. Xnurbs also works in V5, so V5 with VSR and XNurbs is quite a powerful combo. At this point I have V5, V6 and V7 WIP installed. I will upgrade to V7 when it’s released, but not sure I would be ready to give up V5.

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I would add an “Edge approximation” tool similar to what’s available in VSR for Rhino 5. In essence, it re-trims a selected trimmed surface edge do user-set value to make it less dense, resulting in a much simpler adjacent surface that matches to this particular trimmed edge (or an extrusion built from the latter).

Also, a better “Blend surface”, as mentioned by a few people above. I already started a topic for this here:

Skew surface, proposed by @eobet , is yet another useful tool that was also shown in the video @thomas_parel posted above regarding the VSR tool:

Arrows for a direct control point manipulation similar to what Alias has. This is an extremely important tool that I’m sure will make the life of many modelers easier:

Light lines that we discussed many times recently, would be also a welcome improvement for the current Zebra analysis tool.

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If I can meddle in the discussion … it is useless to make words on words, requests on requests; let’s start from a solid basis: in Rhino you would need tools, at least, like those of VSR. Let’s start from this fixed point. If Rhino still cannot provide the quality proposed by VSR, it means that it is lacking! They are doing a good job with SubDs, but rhino can never be Modo or 3D Studio Max; Rhino is nurbs mainly, therefore, tools like blend srf, match srf, etc. they should be the state of the art, in my humble view.
For example, with the XNurbs plug-in you enable the lack of a multiblend (the Rhino patch is stuck in the Stone Age).
I believe that this plug-in is now necessary to integrate it with Rhino. But that’s not enough, this is only a small part of the improvements needed to be introduced in many Rhino tools.

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All this threads and request had been posted for years by dozens of professionals. I would just say, get an expert of Alias and and expert of Icem, and then you walk through all the features and workflows. The room for improvement is huge. But, what’s totally lacking this discussion is if McNeel is actually willing or able produce such tools and if so, do they actually have the capacity to do so… There are so many people who like to see feature A or B, but then they use Alias or Icem anyway…

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Of course - everyone on this thread wants the core Rhino tool to be better. There are fundamental surfacing workflows that could be MUCH smoother for the beginner if they are solved for the 30 year veteran.
The PS4 controller here is a decent example of the design that was OK for the novice but not optimized for higher demand gaming. If the power user ergonomics are improved it can improve the experience for most users.
As designers we have to understand the standards of the power user and design the ease of use for a novice - same for Rhino- not an easy task for any team.
The newer GenZ designers have a completely different set of standards and expectations- McNeel Assoc also taps into a larger and different user base and ideas when developing SubD and computational tools - like any good company they will probably circle back to core surfacing tools and hopefully threads like this will give the team ideas for improving traditional modeling.-eg many here are talking about modeling tools for edit points controls that would use almost a poly modeling toolset. This cross pollination from SubD could make traditional edit point modeling radically more fluid.

The users posting on here have been plugging away because we want to give an idea to the Rhino team about HOW we use the tools and what we would need for an optimized UX for intuitive powerful and clean modeling in Rhino.

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In a brighter future I would love to see two more features in Rhino:

  1. Vast improvement of the fillets. For example, Solidworks does a very god job in this regard (still, with some limitations). I rarely used the “Fillet” command over the years, but when I needed it, it usually involved manual creation of surfaces with the “Fillet surface” command and lots of trims and regular modeling to fix what the former was unable to achieve. But I know that there are many Rhino users who often need good fillets in their workflow.

  2. Mating of primitives such as balls, flat surfaces, cylinders etc. Again, similar to the easy learning curve of the mating in SolidWorks. This will open a whole new opportunity for many Rhino users to simulate the operation of regular doors, sliding doors, multi-piece garage doors, windows, car and motorcycle suspensions, gears, airplane and boat propellers, adjustable chairs, gas shocks, and various other mechanical assemblies.
    There was a plug-in for kinematic simulation for Rhino 4 and 5 called “Driving dimensions” that had a limited ability to mate some simple primitives, though it was a far cry from what SW allows. Its biggest limitation was that it used numerical control of the corellation between parts, so it was impossible to use the mouse to freely move the mated parts directly in the viewport. SolidWorks allows that and it gives a huge freedom to explore how a component would behave.

I agree and disagree- if I were to triage then I would suggest that improvements be focused on modeling. Maybe because Rhino and Solidworks are paired so often - Id rather McNeel focus on form creation tools and class A cleanliness if possible and not replicate more CAD like functionality for core tools. That said - A kinematic mechanism design toolset is critical to my design process for layout of tight small precision products (90% of my work)- I just use Solidworks for it.

I’m all for having Rhino with improved NURBS modeling tools. Don’t get me wrong. :slight_smile: I often write new topics with suggestions for new functionality that could help with the modeling.
However, kinematic simulation is a critical part of the design in many industries, including product design and architecture. Many freelancers and hobbyists can’t afford to pay the annual “rent” of SolidWorks (it’s not an actual ownership as it expires after a year).

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@pascal, There’s a lot of people giving useful feedback here all the time, but I believe that seeing how VSR handles certain things will be very helpful for the developers at McNeel. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I believe that Rhino is already doing a lot of what VSR does behind the scenes, but VSR implemented a very useful user interface for this.

Given that I’m in Seattle, I would be more than willing to come to the office so you guys can experience firsthand how some of this was implemented in VSR.

Also, the VSR YouTube channel is still live, so you can see a lot of the functionality that is referenced in this thread in their videos.

https://www.youtube.com/user/VirtualShapeResearch/videos

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That’s the frustrating part, isn’t it? You get this sense that somewhere in the mountain of code within Rhino the functionality exists but hasn’t been exposed to the user with a fluid interface.

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This bit, at least, should be better in the next WIP.

-Pascal

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Can fillet extensions over the the surface edges be turned off? I build all my fillets by hand and those extensions are always in the way.

Hello - does ShrinkTrimmedSrf get you the result you are after? Also, you might try testTrimRefit in the V7 WIP - I have not tried it on a fillet surface but it might do…

Seems like it does the right thing in my quick test:

Note this is still a test command… and does not autocomplete and is not supported and has a crappy UI , though in theory it is on its way to being promoted. (i.e. use at your own risk, though in this case it would not hurt to report any problems you run into as we do want to make this a full command)

-Pascal

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Good idea, I will try the shrink command!

You are seriously working on a Trim Refit Command?
That is awesome!

This might be inappropriate but I give you a big big hug! :smiley: hahaha

Thank you for all the great work!

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