Hi Jason,

> From my point of view MOI is a great NURBS immersion
> application that subd modelers would gravitate to and
> having some similar workflows between the two camps
> would be great.

I guess I'm not quite sure what the value add would be if the workflows were very similar...

I mean if a polygon modeler wanted to have the same kind of workflow that they already have, why not just use the tool that they already have?

To me it seems like it provides more value to those people if they have an additional tool that works differently from what they currently have, and is better at different kinds of tasks, etc... That way the additional tool expands their overall toolset in new areas instead of just going over the same well treaded ground that they have already covered.

But still, in the future I would like to fill out the "surface point squishing" toolset in MoI some more. It is just more that the initial focus and priorities have been on more of the construction and 2D profile driven areas instead.


> Any thoughts of supporting different styles of curves like bezier, cubic etc?

Not particularly at this point - actually the standard Freeform draw curve tool in MoI will make a cubic curve already.

The sort of classic style of Bezier curves tend to be somewhat problematic, they are really a set of smaller 4 point curves that are chained together to make them look like a longer curve, but you don't get very good smoothness between each of the pieces. This is not too noticeable in 2D only outlines but once you have surfaces and things like reflections and highlights on the surfaces the lack of smoothness becomes more noticeable.

NURBS were essentially invented to solve this problem and provide a type of curve that can have more than 4 points in it which will ensure a greater degree of smoothness interior to the curve. So adding Bezier curves would be kind of like going backwards in technology and bringing back problems that are solved with NURBS.

By the way Pilou, this does not at all mean that Pierre Bezier's work is not important, in fact in many ways it provides the foundation for NURBS. NURBS is kind of an extension that helps to solve some particular kinds of problems.

- Michael