@otb designworks said:

@davejay said:

Its interesting that you say that you would never use Rhino for architectural work. Rhino with its Grashopper plugin has been extremely popular with Architects. In fact that type of visual programming interface has inspired various copy cats in the Architectural Design products such as Dynamo (Revit) and Marionette (Vectorworks).

Grasshopper is not available for Mac and Layouts are not either, so there is no chance of producing effective and efficient plansets at this time.

You are right about that. For me operating system is irrelevant as far as I get the work done.

@sketchuh said:

i always think the strength of sketchup is it's simplicity and the weakeness of sketchup is it's simplicity. I always hate it and love it at the same time.

until there is SERIOUS competition from another new and similar software, Sketchup will always bring NO real updates to people who are screaming the loudest in the wishlist topic.

Do you guys think is it possible any company would develop a software that is more like a hybrid of sketchup/3ds max and or modo or etc...

I really want a software that is easy to use like sketchup but has all the traditional 3d software functionality.

again, I don't think Sketchup has real competitions out there. 3ds vs maya? apple vs microsfot? xbox vs ps,... Sketchup vs who??? I should stop here.

Have you tried Renga Architecture ?
It's the latest fresh product in the Building/Architecture Design market and ramping up fast in terms of intuitive features for the AEC/BIM workflows.

http://rengacad.com/en/

@otb designworks said:

I'm teaching myself Rhino right now.

I really like it; while it isn't quite SU for ease of modeling, it does have a very nice inference and customizable snapping interface that, once you figure out it's "flow", it is really very powerful. And the modeling tools are awesome; it pretty much even has a push/pull tool.

There are a ton of online video tutorials and training aids and their forum is very helpful as well. What has taken me the most time to come to terms with is that there seems to be 5 different ways to accomplish anything and there are 5 different ways to access each of the 5 different ways and trying to figure out what is fastest and most efficient is a trial and error process.

I am using the MAC version, which is still missing some functions, but I find it to be a very useful software to know how to use, especially if you need to produce STEP or IGES files. Another huge benefit to Rhino is that it can import and export darned near every file type out there, which makes it fantastic as a file converter.

I would never, however, use it for architectural work and blueprinting; to me, SU-LO is a better solution for that.

Its interesting that you say that you would never use Rhino for architectural work. Rhino with its Grashopper plugin has been extremely popular with Architects. In fact that type of visual programming interface has inspired various copy cats in the Architectural Design products such as Dynamo (Revit) and Marionette (Vectorworks).