Most Of My Images Are Gone

Over the years I've posted many screenshots answering questions here. Besides most of my gallery images, which mostly disappeared two days ago, then reappeared last night, now most of those are gone and also gone are basically all of my older inline images, answering questions and solving student problems. That's a great resource, now meaningless without the images.

There are extensive links and followups for nearly every image, but no way to reupload each image, assuming I can find them, without losing the links and followups, since I can't update the source image, only delete the entire entry.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Tom Svilans on October 20, 2017 at 8:09am

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on October 20, 2017 at 8:51am

"all the commands are about walls and ceilings " What is Revit?

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on October 20, 2017 at 11:31am

Seems official now, admin claims they can't restore them.

This is correct. As I mentioned to you in a reply to a DM, we are working on getting them back.

Keep us updated on your adventures in Dynamo, Revit, Fusion!

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on October 21, 2017 at 12:26pm

Nik, We don't mind you telling us that our software sucks. In fact, it's such expression that makes us think about parts of Rhino that could be improved. Also, we value what our users do, whether with Rhino, interoperating with third party software, or even explaining the differences between software. Our users have made amazing things connecting Rhino to other software. It makes us proud that we can provide a platform for that to happen.

As you know, Rhino's foundation is NURBS, not meshes. For me, it's awesome to see how you manipulate meshes with great ease. It is a part of Rhino that I'd love to see improved, as would many others.

That being said, let's be accurate:

You banned my account for an evening because I posted the most amazing breakthrough ever seen in Rhino, which is adding ZBrush to it, as a miserable PhD student troll tried to throw the rule book at it as being "irrelevant."

Nik, I've explained why you were banned. You breached our Terms of Service in several ways, in several posts, dating back several months.

I highly suspect they were vandalized by an administrator since they reappeared for a day after I initially complained.

I've also explained that the missing images are something we are trying to understand. We agree that your images, when relevant to the topic, are a great contribution to this community. The fact they've gone missing is an issue with the Ning platform. Hopefully everything can be fixed. I've already apologized and explained this to you. It is very rare to ban someone and then reinstate their membership. We've never done that (that I know). Usually once someone is banned, they stay banned.

Permalink Reply by ShynnSup on October 21, 2017 at 6:54pm

I don't really know why this thread is being use as a diary of software exploration, but this is really good content!

Im a bit confused though, should I start learning blender or not Nik?

PD: From a design point of view, I think all those grasshopper copycats are awful, IMHO.

Permalink Reply by ShynnSup on October 22, 2017 at 8:41pm

I must say first I am not very experienced in scripting. Having said that, I think:
1. Doesnt grashopper allow you yo create your own nodes whether with Python, VB or C#?
2. I think you are asking developers to tweak their software for something it was not meant to do. As you well know, rhino specifies in NURB surface modelling, thats why you might never hear them talking about fighting for mesh features, at least the most advanced ones. Which is logical, they have suplemented the basics, because they do not specify in them. Imagine asking for the features Rhino has for surface modelling to the developers of a mesh based software.
3. Agreed, open source for gh would be great. But every developer is in their right to decide what they think is best.

Not trying to defend anyone here, just my thoughts on the matter.
Good luck to you Nick.

Permalink Reply by Siemen on October 22, 2017 at 8:50am

Regardless of whether or not Nik was supposed to get a temporary ban or not, it's gonna be a sad day for Grasshopper if those images cannot be retrieved. That was a lot of useful information and research that is now gone...

And Nik, I understand it pissed you off quite a bit that this happened but I'm sure that if they would have known that this would have been the outcome, they wouldn't have done it.

Permalink Reply by Thomas Helzle on October 22, 2017 at 10:37am

Hm - while I'm not sure about your tone towards McNeel, I also moved on last year to Houdini Indie and now Core and couldn't be happier. Grasshopper is way too slow for serious work and Rhino is very archaic in it's whole structure. Good for some limited things but not too much fun in the long run in 2017.

Still I learned a lot here, some of it from you, and for that I'm very thankful! :-)
Losing all that content is indeed bad.

But I personally can't see McNeel as "evil" while I have no problem seeing Autodesk as such. They killed XSI (my tool of choice for almost 10 years) and now plumb XSI ICE into Maya - no thanks.

I too can't see myself buying Rhino 6 ATM, since like you, I think it's a bit underwhelming in scope and the new licensing doesn't improve things.

At one point it's time to move on, even if it's hard and needs letting go of grudges - I can be just as emotional about software as you, but the energy spent on trying to make Rhino/Grasshopper into something it's not is simply wasted.

Thankfully I finally found a new home softwarewise, I went through many of the applications you mention but they all have their own flaws and limitations. SideFX at least have the right spirit, Houdini moves along joyfully, problems get fixed fast with daily builds, support is great, the software handles big assets easily and the combination of nodes and code (Python, VEX...) is a joy to use for my generative work. The community is amazingly helpful and communicates often on a very high level (for instance forums.Odforce.net). Works for me :-)

I wish you all the best in your journey and again, thank you for the insights I gained from your posts in the past.

Cheers,

Tom

Permalink Reply by Thomas Helzle on October 23, 2017 at 4:40am

Yeah, Houdini is frigging deep and while being around for ages, it somehow manages to avoid becoming a stale old code sink. The update to 16 was mindblowing in scope compared to other vendors.

You can compile SOP node structures now, which is crazy fast.

A lot of nodes you can open up and dive into how they are created.

I especially recommend looking into VEX and wrangles, they are multithreaded by default and extremely fast, Python is slower but better for file access.

Another nice thing is, that you don't have to deal with pointorder, but can set all kinds of attributes and groups instead which makes much more sense when things get larger.

Also interesting is, that they are a major contributor to VDB development, so Houdini is very complete there. Converting geometry between VDB and back is a great way to get organic results - metaballs are no longer as important, I actually never used them.

The new booleans in 16 are also very interesting.

I highly recommend these tutorials: http://www.entagma.com/ Those guys helped me a lot to get into the flow with VEX and Houdini.

There also is a discord server if you are into realtime chatting (It was a bit too much noise for me): https://discord.gg/b8U5Hdy

For me Houdini was and still is life changing every day.

And: Houdini freelancers are very much sought after... :-)

Cheers,

Tom

Permalink Reply by Thomas Helzle on October 23, 2017 at 8:19am

- Computing the Mesh-Dual is hidden in the "Divide" node at the bottom.

- Scatter is awesome and does internal smoothing of the scattered points on demand. It can also react to a density attribute on the mesh...

- Remesh is very similar to Mesh Maschine in GH but realtime and doesn't explode all the time.

- VDB Smooth is very nice on a model like yours (-SDF is usually faster for surface models)... :-)

- You can do the adding of points along lines quickly in Houdini with the Resample node, either by a constant distance or by a certain number of points per span. This can also write a @curveu parameter on the points which is very handy...

- Many things in Houdini are controlled by Attributes on points or primitives. Most of the time those are mentioned in the docs on the node. Poly Extrude for instance can use per-poly attributes to individually extrude them, Copy to Points uses Attributes extensively for size, orientation etc. ...

- Some polygon nodes benefit from adding a Normal node after them, for instance PolyWire.

I very quickly moved all my work other than pure SDS Polymodelling to Houdini. But it's getting better there too.

For rendering I got Redshift, which is a very nicely integrated GPU renderer for production. Octane is also integrated, but doesn't work as well with the Houdini-thinking yet (3.1 should improve that with OSL support). Mantra is great but relatively slow.

This blog is an absolute treasure-trove of helpful pieces of knowledge for Houdini: http://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=Houdini

Cheers,

Tom

Permalink Reply by Thomas Helzle on October 23, 2017 at 10:34am

Yeah, Houdini makes knitting fun again... ;-)

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on October 23, 2017 at 2:35am

We do not have the tools to delete images while leaving the image page intact. Ning must be clearing files off of their servers. There is a discussion about this within McNeel, but all we're trying to figure out now is a way of getting stuff back (which is us talking to Ning, and they do not like to talk) and how to cache/transfer the current data so we have a backup for when something like this happens again.