Official Luthiers Forum!

If you're a Mac person and have been looking for affordable 3D software, Rhino for OS-X has gone out of beta and is now available for sale http://www.rhino3d.com/sales/north-amer ... ted_States

$300 is pretty cheap for what you get. I'm a SolidWorks guy (and have a PC for that unfortunately) and I'll probably pick it up for compatibility purposes.

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

I'm now a Creo guy... at least at the office. it is probably the best fully parameteric 3D cad software out there right now. Well, okay their may be better stuff out there, but it is a definite step up from SW, which isn't as fully parametric. Not that any of that means a darn thing for what we do...


So Andy, did you talk Tom Dowey into a CNC like yours?

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I'm just bringing up the Rhino thing because it's really affordable. SW and Creo are over $4k which puts them in another league. Apparently Rhino has some surfacing stuff that works pretty well too.

I've not used Creo at all so don't really know anything about it. My guess is that NX and Catia are better than SW and Creo but, they're also in at over $15k a seat. With the amount of cash I've got into SW and VM for SW, I don't see myself changing over. I'm able to make necks from dimensions in a spreadsheet so that's good enough for me.

I am curious though as why you think that SW isn't fully parametric though. It may just be that I've not worked with a "fully" parametric modeler but other than the real details of certain features, everything else is parametric. E.g. in a sweep, you wouldn't be able to configure what the sweep path is but most everything else you can. In my neck model e.g. I can select the volute types just by changing one cell in the spreadsheet.

Yep, Tom told me he would be pulling the trigger as soon as he got home! He's pretty excited!

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

Don't know if all of you are aware, but Autodesk Fusion360 is CAD/CAM in the cloud that works on both Windows and Mac. If you are a startup, in education or have a business turnover of less than $100K then it's free. Which is going to cover most all of the small luthier shops. And that includes the full 3D CAM version.

Otherwise $300/yr which is the bargain of a lifetime if you've been pricing out any of this type of software plus 3D cam with high speed machining. I'm on a free account, but if I had to pay the $300 I'd be happy to.

Also has drawing, rendering, version control and sharing / collaboration built right in. I work on files with a mate that lives 2,000km from me.

I'm on a Mac and I've been using in now for a month, and while it's in some ways similar to how SolidWorks operates, it's different enough to require some time learning it. Oh, and it's actually really fast on my Mac.

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Allen R. McFarlen
Barron River Guitars & Ukuleles
Facebook
Cairns, Australia

Great news!

I've emailed my reseller to request a licence purchase.

I'm really looking forward to the day when Grasshopper, MadCAM, T-splines, RhinoWorks and other plugins work on the OS X version of Rhino. I'm starting to believe that the day will come!

There's a new cloud CAD software called OnShape that I'm really impressed with. It's being done by the original Solidworks team, and it's pretty fantastic. First cloud software where I felt I wasn't getting shorted in any way, and it's got some amazing collaboration features (like having multiple people working on the same model, at the same time!). They just got lofts, so give it a go!

Like Andy, I'm curious about what advantages Creo has over Solidworks, from someone that's used both.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

Yes, this is very interesting. A friend just bought the lifetime setup but hasn't played with it yet.

Generally speaking though, it probably gives you at least most of the functionality of Rhino plus a $500 to $1500 CAM package for very reasonable prices.

Time permitting, I'll have a look at it as it seems very affordable for the small shop.

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

That's fantastic news -- I've been using Rhino for almost fifteen years, and have been waiting for this day almost that long!


Ken Jones
Mountain Song Guitars

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Mountain Song Guitars www.mountainsongguitars.com

My reseller just offered me the promotional price for owners of Rhino 5 for Windows: only $95.00 US

Amazing deal

thanks Andy, I've got Vectric Vcarve pro with my consumer cnc, and it is actually good software, but rudimentary on the cad side. I jumped on that Rhino5 for mac deal and played with it some already. It runs really fast on my mac, and looks to be very powerful. Years ago, I used Catia and Cadam as an aerospace engineer, and I think Rhino is going to be great to develop the models I take over to the vectric software,
Mike