Official Luthiers Forum!

Hi Everyone,
I would like to hear from anyone who uses Rhino. I am currently working toward my associates degree in cad cam manufacturing and have taken all of the classes for Mastercam and two of the four classes in Solidworks. As you all know the programs are expensive to buy, let alone maintain (I believe maintenance on Mastercam and Solidworks is over 1000 dollars a year). Don't get me wrong the programs are great, but just not realistic unless you are a larger company. Rhino and madcam are the only companies I know of that let you buy the current and fully functioning software as a student, and let you upgrade later for a fair price if a new version comes out. However when I look at Rhino, I feel extremely lost.
So here are some questions

1. Have any of you have purchased any training materials for rhino, books, videos etc, and which ones you like.
2. Attended a rhino training seminar ( again they offer a nice student discount)
3. Used madcam to post code and mill parts, and how satisfied you were with it

I have chosen alibre design for a parametric modeler. They gave me a good discount on it, and let me pay interest free for a year. There yearly maintenance fees are also reasonable, and it is very similar to solidworks. They have made their software fully compatible with rhino acknowledging rhinos superior surfacing abilities. It seems this may be a powerfull software group, if I can learn rhino well enough, and madcam works well for machining guitar parts. I know there are alot of software threads, so please bear with me if you have answered these questions in a thread I have not read yet.
Thanks for the knowledge and info,
Evan

Even,

I will start by saying that I have near ZERO knowledge on these softwares. But I recently purchased Rhino (about $800 USD) and have just started to play with it. It has about 500 pages of tutorial information on the disc and that is what I am reading through and then I will fire up the computer and work through it. Also, VisualMILL has made a plug in they call RhinoCAM that seems like a good fit and it too is in $1000 mark for the basic software without the student discount. I have been dealing with 3D Techinics (google them) in Vancouver BC but They have offices in the US as well.

Shane

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Canada

The Rhino manual and online help are very extensive, and the newsgroup is the most responsive place on the web to get help. I learned everything I needed to know from basic tutorials online and the help, with a bit of newsgroup when I was stuck on something harder.

MADCam, at least three years ago (before they made a big marketing mistake and ONLY offered the expensive 4-axis version as the next one) was quite usable and relatively intuitive. Visual mill is sort of like MasterCAM lite, IMO, and it's pretty good software. Both of them are a lot easier to use than MasterCAM so they should be much easier to learn, but you won't quite get the power of MasterCAM in either. MADCam, IIRC, lets you do curve machining so you can construct the more complicated toolpaths by hand in that, where I don't believe you can do curve machining in Visual Mill basic (which is what RhinoCAM is).

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

The downside to RhinoCAM is that it slows Rhino down and when you upgrade Rhino, you have to upgrade RhinoCAM at the same time.

The upside is that it's really easy to re-post files.

Maybe I can help with the Madcam questions. I am one of the US beta testers, resellers and help with support.

1. Have any of you have purchased any training materials for rhino, books, videos etc, and which ones you like.I haven't bought any training materials, but I have paid for some individual training.

2. Attended a rhino training seminar ( again they offer a nice student discount)
The very best training you can get are the 2-3 day schools, but the other really good option is to do the tutorials and post on the Rhino User Group


3. Used madcam to post code and mill parts, and how satisfied you were with it
I have used Madcam exclusively for 4 years and have no plans to ever use any other cam software. I have milled parts in 3d, 2d, engraved and inlay. I have never had a problem with the quality of the parts or the code from Madcam. On the other hand, I find the bugs way before you do!!!

If I can answer any specific questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Now to address Bob's statement on pricing. Bob, I do agree with you. I agreed with you then too! Joakim was getting advice from his only US reseller here in the US, and in my opinion gave bad advice. Since that time, I have convinced Joakim to introduce an "entry level" seat of Madcam. It is 3 axis only and does not contain all of the machining strategies, but I can promise you it will do everything a luither will need. I haven't looked in a few weeks, but I think the price is $695 US. Madcam also offers a student version but I don't deal with that too much.

The beauty of Madcam is that it sits inside Rhino and functions just like it is part of Rhino, does not slow it down and you can make changes in Rhino as you are using Madcam.

I hope this info helps, and again, let me know if I can help.

Mike