tspine+rhino is more useful. Maya is mostly for fluid/blob form.( but don't take my words blindly since I never touched maya at all) I would say most firm would need rhino+tspint more than maya.

" I would say most firm would need rhino+tspint more than maya."
I assume you're talking about firms that do blob buildings. As far as I know, the average brick colonial architect doesn't use neither.

So it depends on what you want to use it for and what is your documentation tool. If you intend to use autocad as documentation tool, I would recommend Rhino + t splines, but if you are into BIM then you are better of using Maya as a conceptual tool.

Most of firms don't use rhino. Yes. You are right.

But most of big firms are using Rhino, that is the point.

i don't get why everyone doesn't use rhino. Once I learned it and realized how easy it is, I started phasing out sketchup.

rhino:
- is easy to learn, especially if you know autocad
- does rectilinear things (even colonial things)
as well as blobs & algorithms
- makes cleaner geometry when exporting to cad than sketchup
- reads & writes so many file types well that it works as a converter, too
- has a great, engaging, responsive developer
- has an active, friendly and helpful user community
- has a vray plugin that is a little faster & more robust in vray for skp

seems like once a week or more there is some discussion on here where some one or ones are talking about rhino as though it is like learning maya or houdini and that that its purpose is blobs and geometric sculpture

not so

jmanganelli: what you posted is an intelligent response. I felt sorry that I didn't explain a little bit more. You explained well.

Here is a massing sketch in rhino. If I do it in cad, when I done with my boolean, my creativity would be gone already. In RHINO, it just take 5 second.

4 months ago, i'd have said "learn maya, push it into rhino when you need to fab it".

after closely following the developments in the rhino 5 wip releases, i have to say there is zero reason to learn maya unless you're set on rendering with mental ray or playing with cool deformers.

rhino's python engine is based on ironpython, which means comparing it to maya's mel/python would be akin to comparing c# to qbasic.

on top of that, grasshopper has become an extremely sophisticated tool (with a few idiosyncrasies that make me wonder if some of the people in the coding team over there suffer from severe mental deficits), which is a great way to get started with the whole scripting thing.

on top of that, it's easy to hide grasshopper scripts so that you don't panic the baddie bosses that get scared when the young whippersnappers make them interns obsolete with 2 hours of work.

oh yeah, and t-splines support is ridiculously good. i complained in a joking fashion on twitter about a small personal project i was working on and within 30 minutes i had a tsplines rep asking if he could help me.

so yeah. learn rhino+tsplines. and some revit.

Dear all,

I apologize for the LATE response (5 months late). I am now pretty good at t-splines and have used it at work. I still haven't figured out the best "overall" workflow for modeling in tsplines but i'm pretty sure using a "nurbs curve" based workflow is probably most flexible.

As for Rhino 5.0, I have yet to try out the beta, what's so good about it that puts it leaps and bounds ahead of 4.0?

Thanks

for starters, the fact that you can run a 64-bit version is pretty huge.  i have also found it to be very stable. 

in the past, i could hit my 3 GB limit on my 32-bit OS pretty easily sometimes in rhino models and crash the program.  with the 64-bit version, this is not a problem.

Dear jmanganelli,

Thanks for the response! Aside from speed, are there any new killer features in Rhino 5?

Google 'mcneel','rhino 5','what's new' or go to rhino3d.com and look at the features list. Rhino 5, imo, is more about a fundamental code rewrite to improve performance and add powerful, large features, like python scripting, and less about new GUI or NURBS tools.

i don't get why everyone doesn't use rhino.

sketchup = free

rhino = not free

true enough, toasteroven

but if you spring for sketchup pro at 500, then springing for rhino at 780 (cheapest i've seen it) is a steal --- and if you get the academic license (195) which is actually a commercial version that you can use as such when you graduate, it is the best deal around --- think about it --- a world-class modeler with scripting, algorithmic design capacity, drafting capabilities and great integration with render and analysis plug-ins for 195 --- can't be beat ---- especially given that things like grasshopper, the much-improved flamingo nxt render engine, paneling tools, etc are free add-ons right now.