Rhino coming to Mac

The popular 3D modeling program Rhino will be making its way to Mac OS X in the near-term, with a public beta due to arrive shortly. Currently a Windows only product, Rhino can create, edit, analyze, document, render, animate, and translate NURBS curves, surfaces, and solids. It also supports polygon meshes and point clouds. Apparently the Mac OS X version of Rhino will ship with features that are designed to take advantage of technology available exclusively in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), due in feature-complete beta form during next week's Worldwide Developer conference (WWDC) in San Francisco

Architosh spoke with @Last Software (developer of Rhino) CEO Bob McNeel at COFES, reporting "Bob was -- like most developers considering the Mac platform -- cautiously optimistic. The same thing could be said of the Alias folks prior to bringing Maya to Mac OS X, or IMSI/Design with TurboCAD. And UGS' decision to fully support NX 5 on the upcoming Leopard OS is also guarded with this mixture of caution and optimism."

Additional features of the Rhino application include 2-D drafting, annotation, and illustration; ability to ix extremely challenging IGES and mesh files support for wide variety of 3-D digitizing arms, 3-D scanners, and 3-D printers; and ability to scale performance to slower systems.

by MacNN Staff