McNeel ships Rhino 5
Robert McNeel & Associates has released Rhino 5, the long-awaited update to its modelling package.
Although mainly an industrial modelling tool, Rhino has a sizeable following in the entertainment market, particularly among illustrators and as a tool for creating hard-surface assets.
Thousands of new features
Rhino 5 has been in development for more than five years, during which time the developer estimates that it has notched up almost 3,500 new features.
The resulting feature list is, not surprisingly, too lengthy to repeat here, but divides between workflow and performance enhancements, with a smattering of new tools.
New functionality ranges from the universal (UI, modelling, editing and display changes) to more specialist industrial design features (drafting, digital fabrication, point cloud and LIDAR support, and so on).
Rendering updates
The built-in renderer also receives a fair number of enhancements, including support for the Sun and Skylight, and for clipping planes; and there are a number of new display modes.
The Rhino blog also lists a number of third-party tools that have been updated simulataneously, including the Neon raytraced viewport display plugin.
Beta tested
The update has been pretty thoroughly bugfixed, too: Rhino 5 has been in beta for a significant percentage of its development time, with over 40,000 users testing the pre-release version.
Rhino 5 is available now for Windows XP and above, price $995. Registered users will also receive access to the first public builds of Rhino 6, expected early in 2013.