A few of you have seen my last few posts putting various 2.5D solutions through their paces, but I keep coming back to RhinoArt, for two reason,
1: I can stay in Rhino..
2: It costs $400 ;) (did I mention I like this part the most?)
I have been sorely tempted to buy Aspire but cannot bring myself to part with 2K..
So I approached the folks at Mecsoft to let me play with this as part of my dealer licence as I was unable to test it properly in its demo form.
Quick conclusion. I would buy this in a heart beat. The mesh decimate function makes it superbly capably for dealing with meshes inside rhino.. and we all know how well Rhino handles meshes...
ok so the road test.. I figured I would put it to practical use, for the kind of stuff i have been looking for in my day to day work, simple lifting of textures, simple created texturing and then some fancy curve lofting ala AC or Aspire ... all these test at 40 dots per mm.. so pretty dense...
1: CREATE A RING.. NO IMAGE..
2: extract that inner surface and lay it out ready for flowalongsrf, then draw my shapes in the boundary
3: Pop open the browser, pick a size and density and click create! that simple. about 3-5 seconds to get generated mesh.
4: the generated mesh ready to flow back up onto our ring
5: and the result, (quickshaded.. im lazy.. bite me ;) )
6: Now to test array texture self generated
7: lifts quickly as before, around 6- 8 seconds
8: and the flowed result. looks good!
9: now to test a grey-scale texture from the web... (i found the lack of tiling to be a minor annoyance here but the resulting mesh can be tiled in rhino too so i suppose not a biggy...)
10: this lifted faster than the others, less computing?
11: and the result :) all up im pretty happy!
In summation I think at the price this will do me fine, but i do wish there were a few refinements to it.. although a birdy has whispered that there is beta development happening to this.. i may pop a few requests on the mecsoft board ;)
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