If you know autocad then you're 2/3 of the way to learning Rhino, LIG. And even better, Rhino speaks english: just start typing the command you want and it'll guess, usually right, too.
Yeah, I actually have the Rhino 4.0 evaluation version on my computer now and it seems pretty straightforward... I just haven't had the time to sit down and go through the tutorials yet.
It's almost eerie how similar rhino and autocad are in the way that functions are entered and performed, etc. That was a nice surprise (I started using rhino about 4+ years ago).
Now it's time for me to pick up a laptop, so this might be good, although I need to weigh the pros and cons of PC/Mac before I make any decisions based on the availability of a single app.
i have a macbook pro and rhino (bootcamp) and everything seems to work just fine. unlike parallels, bootcamp doesn't slow down the performance of your computer.
Rhino Recognizies Most AutoCAD, commands...so If yu know cad you are almost there...But once you learn the Rhino Commands...it will take you to another level...
to me it seems like Rhino should be called "AutoCAD Extreme" because thats what it feels like....
For all the MAC-using archinetors....
What is the best MAC based drafting program? Do you ever have problems working with/importing autoCAD files? Does it create problems with work flow?
I am a student looking to find reasons to keep my powerbook and not go to the dark side.
I am really hoping not to have massive problems when working with fellow AutoCAD based students.
Get a new Mac Book Pro with an Intel chip and run Windows. There are Mac based drafting programs, ie. ArchiCAD, Vectorworks, etc. but with the new Mac's you can run Windows and use whatever you want.
For those of you purchasing a new Mac Book Pro, are you getting a 15" or 17"? I am getting one soon for grad school and I am torn between the two. I was planning on getting the 17" but that LED screen has me second guessing....
Oh and dddlll - if you want to get 4GB of RAM in your Mac Book Pro I would suggest you do it after market and install it yourself. You will save $300-400 that way cause Apple rips you off for RAM upgrades...
I've used Vectorworks for years, and while it has its limitations, the new release (12.5) has really expanded the program's capabilities.
It now has tons of BIM features, similar to Revit or Bentley Microstation. You can build a 3D model and then extract all of your drawings directly from the model. It's also a pretty intuitive program. Every mac office I've been in (4) has used Vectorworks (not ArchiCAD.)
ArchiCAD is good but its honestly not the best drafting tool. It's ok with drafting but nothing like AutoCAD and thats mostly cause it doesn't have all the quick keys that make AutoCAD really efficient. Some of the tools are hard to find also. But for a program that does modeling, drafting and rendering all-in-one it's probably one of the best out there.
The firm I work in is MAC based, and we use VectorWorks... and after 7 years of using autocad on PC's, I've actually come to like vw more then cad, especially the newest version (v.12) which has made the interface much more user friendly. Of course we have to convert all of our files to .dwgs for all of our engineers and structural people, and sometimes we run into minor problems with the way vw translates groups, references, and hatches... but it's never been a big issue.
It's my understanding that your RAM on a MacBook Pro is fixed and cannot be upgraded. If you get a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM, you're stuck with 2GB forever, so my advice would be to get as much RAM as you can afford.
With the Mac Pro towers, you can upgrade the RAM to your heart's content, or at least up to 16GB.
Sorry LIG but I think you have been misinformed......
You can get 4GB of aftermarket RAM for the new MAC Book Pro's at Crucial for about $350 and there is a little panel on the bottom of the machine that you can open and install the new RAM.
It comes with 2 Dimm slots that can take 2GB chips in each but come stock with 1GB in each.
That survey is pretty good, though a bit dated. And I wonder if they take into account that the 15" is by far more popular than the 17" so with more units out there they will no doubt have more repairs....
My concern is that the new 15" MBP's have an LED backlit screen, which is cool but do I go with the new unproven technlogy or the best of the old technology since the 17" doesn't yet have an LED display?
cp...
how big of an issue is mobility for you? i can't really speak from too much experience, but before I switched to a mac i upgraded from a 15" hp pc to a 17" and the weight and bulk difference was more then noticeable... although I know the mac has a much slimmer profile and is generally lighter so i doubt the 17" would pose much of an issue, just a thought
Mobility is not a huge issue I don't think, since I will be in studio all the time anyways. I will be in Italy for a semester so it may be more of an issue there but I really don't know for sure.
I am more or less sold on the 17", but since other people on this thread were talking about getting the new MBP I was curious which one they were thinking of getting.
"ArchiCAD is good but its honestly not the best drafting tool. It's ok with drafting but nothing like AutoCAD and thats mostly cause it doesn't have all the quick keys that make AutoCAD really efficient"
YOu can program the keys for Archicad for anything you want using a 3rd party tool lke QuickKeys. Vectorworks is a very able 2-d program that I think works faster than Autocad as it has a Mac-centric interface and syntax.
The arrival of Rhino on the Mac platform is very good news.
I ordered it. $3,626.25
$200 off for IPOD NANO 8G RED - mail-in rebate.
So, I paid $3,426.25 for Macbook Pro 15", 2.4GHz. 4G of ram. 160G 7200rpm hard drive and a 8G Ipod nano.
The Macbook pro shipping date is July 23 - 25 (only if you choose the 160G 7200rpm hard drive. Ipod is next week. So, if you are going to order the macbook pro and you wanna play with it. Do that quickly.
This is going to be my toy are UPenn. I will have a second monitor on my desk. It's a fucking old 20" dell. So... come find me, follow the fucking Dell.
dddlll - I guess you didn't read the conversation about how Apple rips you off badly with the RAM upgrade......
....well you could of saved yourself close to $500 depending on where you got the RAM from, but congratulations on the purchase. That will be a sick machine!
So, there are two ram slots in macbook pro. For the 2 GB, it comes with two 1 GB ram, then I will have to sell both of them. The 4 GB are two 2 GB ram.
the student discount saved me some money. well... I have to wait till July 23 or 25 for this sick machine.
So, there are two ram slots in macbook pro. For the 2 GB, it comes with two 1 GB ram, then I will have to sell both of them. The 4 GB are two 2 GB ram.
the student discount saved me some money. well... I have to wait till July 23 or 25 for this sick machine."
Yes I understand how RAM works, but if you ordered more RAM from APPLE then your comp is getting delivered with 4 GB of RAM (2 X 2GB), so how are you going to sell any RAM?
"Buying from Apple of its education arm is really expensive."
Well you get a $200 discount from Apple if you are a student so you would get the 15" for $2299 assuming you didn't get any extra upgrades. So that Amazon price isn't really a deal by any means. That 160 GB 7200 HDD is about $135 extra and adds about a month to your delivery time and the RAM upgrade from Apple is about $700, which is re-goddamn-diculous.
"Well you get a $200 discount from Apple if you are a student so you would get the 15" for $2299 assuming you didn't get any extra upgrades. So that Amazon price isn't really a deal by any means. That 160 GB 7200 HDD is about $135 extra and adds about a month to your delivery time and the RAM upgrade from Apple is about $700, which is re-goddamn-diculous."
Actually, any "discount" that Apple gives you is eaten up in sales tax. Here the sales tax is .0875 or $201 on $2299. Amazon also ships for FREE. The computer COMEs WITH a 160 gb drive. It is only 5400 rpm though.
The memory price savings is about $300. So you would save money even ordering from Amazon
ANd look at Amazon. They usually have a $100 or $150 rebate on their Mac laptops. My guess is that the rebate will go into effect after the new LED screen ones start shipping.
i'm going to buy (and am very excited about it) a 15"-er, and found the brand new upgrades very interesting...
the lower-tier 15":
-2.2GHz Intel chip
-2GB ram
-120 GB hard drive
-NVIDIA Graphics Card w/ 128 MB SDRam (compared to last month's macbook that I think had an ATI card)...
$1799 w/ apple's educational discount
So, is the performance differential that much better to be worth $500 more (letting alone HD space.)? I'll be doing some rendering, drafting, and graphic design...
"So, is the performance differential that much better to be worth $500 more (letting alone HD space.)? I'll be doing some rendering, drafting, and graphic design.."
Rhino on Mac OS X coming soon!
I can finally delete my windows bootcamp partition.
This is awesome!
Now when is AutoCad making the switch?!?
That is awesome.
awesome indeed, but I'll wait until Vray for Rhino comes out for OSX before I delete my partition.
Parallels now supports the GPU, so you can run rhino that way and delete boot camp today.
Sweet... This will be great for whenever I buy a Mac and learn Rhino.
If you know autocad then you're 2/3 of the way to learning Rhino, LIG. And even better, Rhino speaks english: just start typing the command you want and it'll guess, usually right, too.
Yeah, I actually have the Rhino 4.0 evaluation version on my computer now and it seems pretty straightforward... I just haven't had the time to sit down and go through the tutorials yet.
It's almost eerie how similar rhino and autocad are in the way that functions are entered and performed, etc. That was a nice surprise (I started using rhino about 4+ years ago).
Now it's time for me to pick up a laptop, so this might be good, although I need to weigh the pros and cons of PC/Mac before I make any decisions based on the availability of a single app.
any macbook pro users here? how is rhnia's performance on the macbook pro? any information?
i was thinking about buying one.... i'm going to school at Penn
the brand new macbook pro with santa rosa chipset, led backlight, nvidea graphics and 4gigs of ram capacity kicks ass!
i know bro.... I'm getting that one. 4G of Ram, 160G hard drive 7200 rpm... $3100 something w/o tax.
but seriously... how is the rhino doing on macbook pro (bootcamp)... is it fast? any info?
thanks
i have a macbook pro and rhino (bootcamp) and everything seems to work just fine. unlike parallels, bootcamp doesn't slow down the performance of your computer.
Rhino Recognizies Most AutoCAD, commands...so If yu know cad you are almost there...But once you learn the Rhino Commands...it will take you to another level...
to me it seems like Rhino should be called "AutoCAD Extreme" because thats what it feels like....
is rhino for 3d only and you need to export data for cd"s - noob here
For all the MAC-using archinetors....
What is the best MAC based drafting program? Do you ever have problems working with/importing autoCAD files? Does it create problems with work flow?
I am a student looking to find reasons to keep my powerbook and not go to the dark side.
I am really hoping not to have massive problems when working with fellow AutoCAD based students.
Am I dreaming?
ArchiCAD seems to be the de facto Mac-based CAD platform. I haven't used it myself, but I've heard other people say pretty good things about it.
Get a new Mac Book Pro with an Intel chip and run Windows. There are Mac based drafting programs, ie. ArchiCAD, Vectorworks, etc. but with the new Mac's you can run Windows and use whatever you want.
For those of you purchasing a new Mac Book Pro, are you getting a 15" or 17"? I am getting one soon for grad school and I am torn between the two. I was planning on getting the 17" but that LED screen has me second guessing....
Oh and dddlll - if you want to get 4GB of RAM in your Mac Book Pro I would suggest you do it after market and install it yourself. You will save $300-400 that way cause Apple rips you off for RAM upgrades...
I've used Vectorworks for years, and while it has its limitations, the new release (12.5) has really expanded the program's capabilities.
It now has tons of BIM features, similar to Revit or Bentley Microstation. You can build a 3D model and then extract all of your drawings directly from the model. It's also a pretty intuitive program. Every mac office I've been in (4) has used Vectorworks (not ArchiCAD.)
ArchiCAD is good but its honestly not the best drafting tool. It's ok with drafting but nothing like AutoCAD and thats mostly cause it doesn't have all the quick keys that make AutoCAD really efficient. Some of the tools are hard to find also. But for a program that does modeling, drafting and rendering all-in-one it's probably one of the best out there.
The firm I work in is MAC based, and we use VectorWorks... and after 7 years of using autocad on PC's, I've actually come to like vw more then cad, especially the newest version (v.12) which has made the interface much more user friendly. Of course we have to convert all of our files to .dwgs for all of our engineers and structural people, and sometimes we run into minor problems with the way vw translates groups, references, and hatches... but it's never been a big issue.
You haven't been to my office then....:)
I have heard good things and bad things about Vectorworks as well. No program is perfect though.....
*sorry like farwest said... the newest version is 12.5
It's my understanding that your RAM on a MacBook Pro is fixed and cannot be upgraded. If you get a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM, you're stuck with 2GB forever, so my advice would be to get as much RAM as you can afford.
With the Mac Pro towers, you can upgrade the RAM to your heart's content, or at least up to 16GB.
Living in Gin,
That's only partly true. There are a limited number of RAM slots on the Macbooks, but they are upgradable.
Mine, for instance, came with two slots. One had a 1 GB simm in it, and I added another 1GB myself, for 2GBs.
So they are expandable.
Sorry LIG but I think you have been misinformed......
You can get 4GB of aftermarket RAM for the new MAC Book Pro's at Crucial for about $350 and there is a little panel on the bottom of the machine that you can open and install the new RAM.
It comes with 2 Dimm slots that can take 2GB chips in each but come stock with 1GB in each.
Gotcha... I was relaying what the guy at the Apple Store told me. Maybe he was misinformed, or was trying to push the 3GB MacBook Pro on me.
So anyways.....the new Mac Book Pro.....15" or 17"? What do you guys think?
This survey seems to conclude that the 17" is less prone to defects, for what it's worth...
http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/macbooks.html
That survey is pretty good, though a bit dated. And I wonder if they take into account that the 15" is by far more popular than the 17" so with more units out there they will no doubt have more repairs....
My concern is that the new 15" MBP's have an LED backlit screen, which is cool but do I go with the new unproven technlogy or the best of the old technology since the 17" doesn't yet have an LED display?
is about how ur computer looks or is about what u can do w/it??
not rhino, but...
you can download a "non-commercial" version of autodesk maya from the apple website...
don't even go there man. that is definitely not what this question is about.
its about a 17" display versus a 15" display....sooooooo....they look the same only one is bigger.
cp...
how big of an issue is mobility for you? i can't really speak from too much experience, but before I switched to a mac i upgraded from a 15" hp pc to a 17" and the weight and bulk difference was more then noticeable... although I know the mac has a much slimmer profile and is generally lighter so i doubt the 17" would pose much of an issue, just a thought
Mobility is not a huge issue I don't think, since I will be in studio all the time anyways. I will be in Italy for a semester so it may be more of an issue there but I really don't know for sure.
I am more or less sold on the 17", but since other people on this thread were talking about getting the new MBP I was curious which one they were thinking of getting.
"ArchiCAD is good but its honestly not the best drafting tool. It's ok with drafting but nothing like AutoCAD and thats mostly cause it doesn't have all the quick keys that make AutoCAD really efficient"
YOu can program the keys for Archicad for anything you want using a 3rd party tool lke QuickKeys. Vectorworks is a very able 2-d program that I think works faster than Autocad as it has a Mac-centric interface and syntax.
The arrival of Rhino on the Mac platform is very good news.
I ordered it. $3,626.25
$200 off for IPOD NANO 8G RED - mail-in rebate.
So, I paid $3,426.25 for Macbook Pro 15", 2.4GHz. 4G of ram. 160G 7200rpm hard drive and a 8G Ipod nano.
The Macbook pro shipping date is July 23 - 25 (only if you choose the 160G 7200rpm hard drive. Ipod is next week. So, if you are going to order the macbook pro and you wanna play with it. Do that quickly.
This is going to be my toy are UPenn. I will have a second monitor on my desk. It's a fucking old 20" dell. So... come find me, follow the fucking Dell.
dddlll - I guess you didn't read the conversation about how Apple rips you off badly with the RAM upgrade......
....well you could of saved yourself close to $500 depending on where you got the RAM from, but congratulations on the purchase. That will be a sick machine!
I read the conversation.
So, there are two ram slots in macbook pro. For the 2 GB, it comes with two 1 GB ram, then I will have to sell both of them. The 4 GB are two 2 GB ram.
the student discount saved me some money. well... I have to wait till July 23 or 25 for this sick machine.
"So, I paid $3,426.25 for Macbook Pro 15", 2.4GHz. 4G of ram. 160G 7200rpm hard drive and a 8G Ipod nano"
Amazon:
MacBook Pro $2494
1-800-4-MEMORY
2 x 2gigs $109x2=$218
Smalldog.com
8 gig ipod nano $249
total: $2961 plus shipping on the nano and the memory
None of these has sales tax and the Macbook Pro shipping is free. The ram is easy to install.
You could have saved about $400!
Buying from Apple of its education arm is really expensive.
"I read the conversation.
So, there are two ram slots in macbook pro. For the 2 GB, it comes with two 1 GB ram, then I will have to sell both of them. The 4 GB are two 2 GB ram.
the student discount saved me some money. well... I have to wait till July 23 or 25 for this sick machine."
Yes I understand how RAM works, but if you ordered more RAM from APPLE then your comp is getting delivered with 4 GB of RAM (2 X 2GB), so how are you going to sell any RAM?
"Buying from Apple of its education arm is really expensive."
Well you get a $200 discount from Apple if you are a student so you would get the 15" for $2299 assuming you didn't get any extra upgrades. So that Amazon price isn't really a deal by any means. That 160 GB 7200 HDD is about $135 extra and adds about a month to your delivery time and the RAM upgrade from Apple is about $700, which is re-goddamn-diculous.
"Well you get a $200 discount from Apple if you are a student so you would get the 15" for $2299 assuming you didn't get any extra upgrades. So that Amazon price isn't really a deal by any means. That 160 GB 7200 HDD is about $135 extra and adds about a month to your delivery time and the RAM upgrade from Apple is about $700, which is re-goddamn-diculous."
Actually, any "discount" that Apple gives you is eaten up in sales tax. Here the sales tax is .0875 or $201 on $2299. Amazon also ships for FREE. The computer COMEs WITH a 160 gb drive. It is only 5400 rpm though.
The memory price savings is about $300. So you would save money even ordering from Amazon
This is a good source:
http://www.pcprices.net/macbookpro.shtml
When it comes time for me to buy a MacBook Pro, I may just drive down to Delaware to do it. No sales tax there.
ANd look at Amazon. They usually have a $100 or $150 rebate on their Mac laptops. My guess is that the rebate will go into effect after the new LED screen ones start shipping.
I may finally have to learn Rhino- Anyone wanna by my G5?
This note from Bob McNeel of Rhino3d:
Thanks the interest.
We are just starting the development.
We’ll have a prerelease version available later this month but I expect it will be a year or so before it is released.
I’ll let you know as soon as the first prerelease version is available.
- Bob
Announcement from the DIME 1.0 conference in Puerto Vallarta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPF0HRbUOC0
mcneel beta process is fun stuff, i know i have been doing it since 96-97
you're welcome ;)
but i am no jobs groupie
on the topic of new macbook pros...
i'm going to buy (and am very excited about it) a 15"-er, and found the brand new upgrades very interesting...
the lower-tier 15":
-2.2GHz Intel chip
-2GB ram
-120 GB hard drive
-NVIDIA Graphics Card w/ 128 MB SDRam (compared to last month's macbook that I think had an ATI card)...
$1799 w/ apple's educational discount
the middle-tier 15"
-2.4 GHz
-2GB
-160 GB hard drive
-NVIDIA Graphics Card w/ 256 MB SDRam
$2299 w/ apple's educational discount
So, is the performance differential that much better to be worth $500 more (letting alone HD space.)? I'll be doing some rendering, drafting, and graphic design...
Thanks for any advice!
highway rip off if i can get a Toshiba that can do all that for 650-1000 and a tablet at that
how is it so easy for jobs to get people by the balls?
"So, is the performance differential that much better to be worth $500 more (letting alone HD space.)? I'll be doing some rendering, drafting, and graphic design.."
No
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