John E. Wilson

Our exploration of Rhino's surfaces continues this month, as we look at more ways to create surfaces and tools for modifying surfaces. Rhino, which is short for Rhinoceros, is a powerful, yet moderately priced, 3D modeling program from Robert McNeel & Associates

This month, we continue our exploration of the 3D modeler Rhino as we look at its surface-making tools.

This column continues to explore Robert McNeel & Associates' 3D modeler Rhinoceros. This month we'll take a closer look at its tools for creating curves.

When this column was conceived, 3D modeling was generally restricted to expensive programs that ran only on costly UNIX workstations. AutoCAD, though, was an exception that offered a practical means for many of us to create 3D models.

It is difficult to get excited about AutoCAD 2002, because it contains very little that is new, and it contains nothing new for creating or editing 3D wireframes, surfaces, or solid models. AutoCAD 2002 does, however, have a new feature that will benefit those of you who work with 3D solid models.

For the last year and a half Autodesk has had two programs–Mechanical Desktop and Autodesk Inventor–that essentially do the same sort of work and serve the same market.

Unlike 2D work in which you invariably look straight down on the World Coordinate System's xy plane, you use a variety of viewing directions when you construct 3D models.

Although most people concentrate on Mechanical Desktop's parametric solid-modeling tools, the program also has a decent set of surface-modeling tools that can make smoothly curved shapes.

Release 5 of Autodesk's Mechanical Desktop, profiles no longer need to form a closed loop. In fact a profile can be as simple as a single line.

Even though transferring data directly from computer 3D models to the machines that manufacture parts is becoming increasingly common, you often still need to make fully dimensioned multiview 2D drawings from your 3D solid models.