Rhino isn't a solid CAD app, it doesn't have physics or moments, and fillets, blends, offsets and shelling/thicknessing work differently, sometimes better than ACIS, sometimes worse, but it can be more controllable, if more complex because of the range of surface creation options. It doesn't have associativity, so if you want to edit a surface, you have to re-loft or recreate it through its generating curves, and it doesn't have a Concept Explorer, or any sort of history to jump into, so rebuilds are a start-from-scratch affair, not great for mechanical CAD. It's similar to AutoCAD in its command line, so with a bit of familiarity, you type a letter and it offers the options, all of the tools with the command that begins with that letter. It can be faster than hunting through a toolbar, but its commands are predicated on surfacing. McNeel is pretty focussed on drawing generation and that is improving, again in an AutoCAD vein with paperspaces. It has good inbuilt rendering using Cycles, the same renderer as Blender. Its parametric surfacing capability is unmatched in the price range, and V7 also has subdivision surfaces, and a mesh-to-nurbs capability from that that works something approaching the way T-splines did, T-splines was originally a third-party plug-in in Rhino and SW before it was bought up by Autodesk and incorporated into Fusion360. It also offers access to V8 (next version) builds, which has a shrink-wrap retopology capability that builds quad surfaces over other meshes, like InstantMeshes but more manually, and more transparently, probably more controllably.
Yeah, I'm banging the drum about Rhino. It's not a CAD app, but it extends the capability of any other CAD app as well as bringing its own surfacing capability, which no other program in its price range comes near. Very flexible and sensible licensing arrangements, too.
Edited by user Saturday, January 14, 2023 2:46:09 AM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified
