3Ds Max Patch Modeling

 From:  Michael Gibson
4360.21 In reply to 4360.17 
Hi Shaun,

> I wonder if there would be a way to make a Rebuild
> command for surfaces like there is for curves.

Yup, that should be possible in the future - also it will be possible to extend Add pt to surfaces for adding in an extra line of points to one area of the surface. The way NURBS surfaces work they are always a rectangular grid of points though so you can't just add in a single point somewhere, you have to add in an entire row or column of points.

Basically surface control point editing is not a fully fleshed out area in MoI yet - because things like Boolean and cutting operations are the greatest strong areas of NURBS modeling, I've focused more attention on those strongest areas first.

The basic assumption is that if you like to do surface point editing, you will likely be doing that in sub-d modeling program instead of in MoI, since that is the strong area of sub-d modeling.

As time goes on I will continue to flesh out the surface control point manipulation toolset a bit at a time, but it's fundamentally limited because of that topological restriction I mentioned above where you can't just insert a single point anywhere you want, with NURBS you have to insert an entire row of points since a NURBS surface is defined by a rectangular grid of points. This places a big constraint on point topology, and it's the biggest reason why sub-d modeling became the method to use for that type of point cage manipulation modeling rather than NURBS surfaces.

- Michael