Cad Rhino VS Intellicad?

"Fred Smith" <imserv@... wrote:
Subject: Cad Rhino VS Intellicad?, was Manual programming


Andrew Werby <drewid@...> wrote:

>[Intellicad better than Rhino? Say what? What were you trying to do that
>Rhino couldn't handle? I've been working on this very thing, trying to see
>what Vector can (and can't) do, and Rhino seems to do just fine at making
>simple 2d, square-edged forms, although this is admittedly not an ability
>that sets it apart from the crowd. Maybe if you told us what your specific
>problem was, there would be an equally simple solution. In the meantime, if
>you promise not to badmouth Rhino around here any more, I will forbear from
>venting about Vector in this forum- although I've been cursing it plenty
>under my breath lately...]

Hi Andrew, just testing to see if you were still awake. ;-) For every
body that can hear my "Voice", Rhino is a great design tool for the money.
It was developed by a major Autocad dealer, and as such has an interface &
features that complement Autocad and lend themselves to the Autocad user's
learning curve. Andrew is a dealer and consistently offers good pricing.

[Thanks Fred- you give me one more good reason to keep reading this list...]

I don't have a problem with Rhino, if a hobbyist wants to make a couple of
drawings, a free copy of Intellicad(an Autocad clone developed by Visio
corporation and spun off into semi-public domain when Microsoft bought
Visi-Cad) is a good solution and he probably does not need to spend any
money to buy a CAD program. If however he needs to make a complex flowing,
"organic" shape Intellicad does not have this capability & it may then be
time to spend some money. Rhino has much more than what many of us
dabblers in CNC really need. It also has a more difficult learning curve,
as the 3D concepts are more complex, and there are more things to learn.

[This is all true, but once you learn how to use Rhino, it's not hard to
get it to do almost anything you need it to. (If it won't, you can bother
the programmers directly until they add the feature you want). For me,
anyway, it would be a lot harder to figure out how to use another program
(even if it was free) just to do simple stuff. I feel it's best to spend
your time learning a program that won't refuse to do more complicated
things than you may have originally have had in mind. ]

The #1 reason that I recommend Rhino to people is that it has a GREAT iges
file, surface translator, as ell as several other CAD formats. The last I
looked at Rhino in detail the only insurmountable problem was lack of
dimensioning. I believe that some of this capability was addressed in a
later version, but I am under the impression that the Developer's don't
really want to make Rhino a competitor to Autocad.

[I'm not so sure about that. While Rhino started out as an AutoCad plugin,
the developers soon realized it had more potential as a stand-alone
product. Many Autocad users have migrated to Rhino and never looked back.
(They did add dimensioning some time back- it's in the current 1.1
version). And McNeel & Associates are now busy unhooking the Accurender
plugin they developed for AutoCad and converting it for use with Rhino. It
will be called Flamingo, and will be offered separately from Rhino.]

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

Andrew Werby - United Artworks
Sculpture, Jewelry, and Other Art Stuff
http://unitedartworks.com