Bongo
Animation Plug-In for Rhino

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Bongo is a plug-in for Rhino which adds professional grade animation  of rendered designs.  These animations can be previewed within Rhino and then sent to an animation file for play back on a website, attaching to an email, or sending on a disk to a client.  Examples of uses in the yacht design field are photo realistic "fly-bys" around the outside of a yacht,  or a tour of the inside of the yacht with opening doors and everything rendered to perfection.  Also the working of gear, the handling of sails, and all other operations of yacht handling can be animated so that a student coming to take an educational cruise can start off more familiar with the handling of the vessel than they otherwise could.  If you want to do a maintenance manual for a windlass or an engine, every stage of tear down and re-assembly can be animated and the working of the machine demonstrated.

In our office we don't use this as much as we might on smaller craft.  The percentage that we charge for design doesn't allow us much margin on smaller craft for these rather dramatic animations.  On larger craft and up into the mega-yacht range, they can be very useful as you can not only show the vessel and her interior from all angles, but also model "interior decor" options, which are often very important to well to do clients.  In the larger yachts these animations are reasonably economic to do.

Of course we can always even on quite small designs do these animations, as and extra charge.

It is possible that we would use these wonderful capabilities more if we had Bongo available from our earliest days as designers.  However since we are able to do such beautiful drawings with Rhino and such lovely still renderings with the rendering products like Flamingo and Penguin we have not made much use of Bongo.  This is probably because we have been so busy in the years since Bongo was released that we have not had the time to get to know it.

Nevertheless, we would not want to be without this capability as sooner or later it will undoubtedly be vital for a particular project.  Younger designers with more time to experiment will undoubtedly take hold of this plug-in and do extraordinary things.  In fact we have seen this with some of our students.  As an example a student modeled the stability of a design so that you could see the position of the yacht at any given angle of heel as it progressively heeled further.  It would be perfectly possible to set up an animation so that a person could choose the wind strength and direction, the sail area set, and see how the yacht would respond in an animation. (tm)  $495.00

Educational License for Students, $195:
 

Commercial License, $495
 

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