Hi Tom,
Ian, I don't mean this as a personal attack, but what you wrote in your post concerning Rhino is complete misI am wondering if you have spent much time with the program? >>
I stand corrected ;o(
I must admit I have not used the latest version of Rhino although I
have done quite a bit of work using vesion 2 - what this post does
illustrate quite clearly is that, without regular updates and serious
training, it is easy to miss significant changes in such programs.
I used Autocad for over 12 years at work, doing quite a bit of 3D
stuff, before I ‘found’ Rhino and, at the time, I was quite impressed
with it. The ease with which you can draw in a multi-viewport
environment was quite refreshing. However, maybe since I came from a
‘traditional’ CAD background I’ve never been a fan of mouse-driven
CAD programs and have always regarded them as slow and too cumbersome
for a production environment. Perhaps this is how I came to miss the
features that Tom describes. I obviously need to do some more
research…
Rhino is not, and never will be a parametric CAD program. If I want to move a hole in a surface, I have to do it manually and then rebuild the surface. If I want to resize an object, I have to do it by scaling, not by typing in new dimensions as you would in a parametric program.
This, however, is the main difference between Rhino and Solidworks
(or their equivalents) and is what I was trying (awkwardly) to
describe in my previous post. With the new generation of parametric
programs your starting point is, effectively, a block of material
which you sculpt on the screen and, if you want to change the size or
any other property of a particular feature, you can do so by simply
bringing up its ‘properties’ box and changing the in it
rather than, in the more ‘traditional’ CAD, having to go back several
steps to change and then rebuild the model.
I did not mean my previous post to denegrate Rhino in any way, it is
a good program and each type of CAD has its place in which it
excells. More often than not, the ease with which a program works is
directly related to the cost of the program and so, the more you are
prepared to pay, the easier life will get … except that you then
have SOOOO many more ‘bells and whistles’ to learn about…
Best wishes, Ian –
Ian W. Wright
Sheffield, UK