Rhino for general modeling?

[Steve Baer]

Thanks for all of the input. V4 is very close to an initial service release and we are currently in "feature freeze", but I always make sure to add these items to our ever growing list of things to fix or add. Just so you know, you can always post a wish or complaint to our rhino newsgroup at
news://news.rhino3d.com/rhino
We are going to try to pay more attention to this forum in the future, but a wishlist item posted to that newsgroup will be seen by a lot more people and therefore probably move up the priority list a bit quicker.

As far as your questions:
1. V4 does have layouts with nested detail viewports
2. Associatve dimensions have not been implemented, but they are high on the list of todo items. We got some prototypes working in the office, but figured there was no way we could successfully get this working in time for a V4 release.
3. Yes you can dimension in the layout. It is not a "smart" dimension yet in that you will have to give your dimension a scaling factor instead of this being done automatically
4. Dim object remembered what it is snapped to is also something I would call an associative dimension... so no not yet
5. I'm not sure about the automatic updating of Make 2d stuff. We do have history on certain commands, so this may be done in some form.
6. Yes you can make title blocks on the layouts, but there are no built in attributes that auto-update the text. We've talked about this and could probably put something together in a bonus tool plug-in that does this. I think this also goes with your "fields" questions.
7. Yes, we call our Object Snap tracking "smarttracking". There is an Strack button on the object snap bar that enables this.
8. Auto-Updating of the 2d layouts to track changes in the model have not been implemented yet. We were just trying to lay down the basics of a drafting package for V4 and design it so we could add features like this in the future.
9. Some commands in Rhino can have history enabled so you will be able to have some auto-updating 3d features that you are looking for.
10. I don't have any experience with getting STEP files into Gambit, but if you have problem files please let us know and we will work to try and fix whatever we can on our end.
11. Linux... I don't have any great answer for you guys on this. I know that there would be plenty of people happy to see Rhino running on Linux and Macs, but we don't have a great solution for that yet. These are fantastic operating systems and hopefully some day we could take on that project. The fact is that all of our developer resources are currently focused on getting V4 out the door.

I'll forward the request for a change to the license manager to the developer that works on this. I haven't touched any of that code, so I really don't have an answer for that.

Hope I got all of your questions. Thanks again and please let us know about any features you want added or changed. I would really like to see more of a drive of Rhino development through requests from people in this community.
-Steve

[marshmat]

This has got to be one of the things I love most about Rhino.... developers who listen, care, and constantly strive to improve. Cheers to ya, Steve

[Steve Baer]

Thanks Matt. There are going to be a couple of us that will try to check this forum a few times a week from now on.

Please tell us what we need to do to improve Rhino and make you more productive; it's too hard to think up this stuff by ourselves
-Steve

[Tim B]

I'm fairly sure there is a better way to get machine-specific information than probing reserved IP adresses. How about using the MAC adress of the network card? Sort that out, re-compile against the wine-libs. Hey presto, Rhino runs on Linux. It shouldn't take more than a few days.

Tim B.

[marshmat]

If I'm not mistaken, Tim, isn't that how FlexLM and similar managers do it, by using the MAC address to generate the machine-specific licence file?

[Steve Baer]

We don't use FlexLM. I forwarded this to the developer who writes the license manager in Rhino.

Thanks,
-Steve

[marshmat]

(and with good reason, IIRC- dedicated managers like that are bloody pricey.... and a lot of them are notoriously easy to crack!)