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I've just started using Rhino at a new company. I wish I used this earlier.... no more Solidworks hopefully. Anyway I was wondering if I could get some advice on the best way to animate or setup animations. Is it good to use Bongo? Does that work OK with the Maxwell plugin? Or is it best to use another bit of software like 3DS? The animations probably wont be that complex, mostly zooms, rotates and some of the products will have oving parts... rotating wheels for example.

For basic animation (turntable) I have used standard animation available in Rhino (fly through, turntable, path, one-day-sun-study), and this works fine with Maxwell.
I recently got interested again in Bongo, as they have new features and Bongo 2.0 WIP is available to try. I tested it once, and mxs are being exported, but rendering did not start automatically... have to test it more. Are you new to Rhino?

raja wrote:For basic animation (turntable) I have used standard animation available in Rhino (fly through, turntable, path, one-day-sun-study), and this works fine with Maxwell.
I recently got interested again in Bongo, as they have new features and Bongo 2.0 WIP is available to try. I tested it once, and mxs are being exported, but rendering did not start automatically... have to test it more. Are you new to Rhino?

Thanks. Yeah my first day.

no more Solidworks hopefully

He blasphemes...

Has anyone else got any opinions on Rhino/Maxwell animation?

In the past I've done some animations in Rhino but just with the basic Rhino tools, I also tried Bongo, but that was many years ago, at that time the interface was not intuitive at all, it's probably better now but I'm glad I'm using Solid Works now, it's like Rhino on steroids, with a history tree that can be edited and edited and edited when needed

NicoR44 wrote:In the past I've done some animations in Rhino but just with the basic Rhino tools, I also tried Bongo, but that was many years ago, at that time the interface was not intuitive at all, it's probably better now but I'm glad I'm using Solid Works now, it's like Rhino on steroids, with a history tree that can be edited and edited and edited when needed

Ha you're the opposite to me... I see Solidworks as a kind of Rhino on sleeping pills. It's good for engineering and basic design but you can't do anything complex with surfaces... have you tried T-Splines for Rhino? Also tsElements is useful for going to Solidworks. If Rhino had a parametric history for everything it would be perfect... and I think they're adding more record history options with each update. There are a lot of interesting plugins as well.

Depends on the application though. I'm modelling quite organic products at the moment so Rhino is better for that.

Hehe yes I have worked with T-Splines, a truly great tool to convert mesh to nurbs!!
But what I do now is model my organic models in a mesh modeller, and convert the unsmoothed mesh using T-splines to a Rhino/Solid Works model, see here:
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hilit=grip

So why do you use another mesh modeller and not T-Splines?

Because when using Silo 3d I can get a real lean and clean unsmoothed mesh, and in Silo it's much easier to model when modelling organic shapes (for me that is)

Oh yeah I remember seeing a post a couple of years ago when you were using Silo. I had a go with Silo but couldn't decide between it and Modo.

w i l l wrote:If Rhino had a parametric history for everything it would be perfect...

With Grasshopper everything in Rhino has a parametric history ...on steroids even.

Ok, you can't record Grasshopper history from the Rhino viewport...

Grasshopper indeed looks pretty interesting! I have been watching a webinar just now.

NicoR44 wrote:Grasshopper indeed looks pretty interesting! I have been watching a webinar just now.

It is... especially since there's a Maxwell add-on

But Grasshopper looks to be more for complex shapes not the average extrude, loft and fillet.