Hi Tony, yup I'm sure it could be useful to have an alternate "sub-d oriented" mesher.

But unfortunately developing a new meshing engine from scratch is an extremely time consuming piece of work. For example it took me about 8 months of full time work to achieve the current one in MoI.

Developing a sub-d friendly export would require a very different approach from the current mesher. There would not really be much in common between them.

So it is difficult to figure out how I would come up with such a huge block of time that would be required to work on it...


> Such a lot of things are soooo much easier in MoI, but turning
> them into a sub-d suitable mesh is not so easy so kind of negates
> the benefits.

"negates the benefits" ? No, that's not correct at all for the more typical use where you are exporting meshes from MoI with the intent to render them.

Why are you trying to turn them into a sub-d suitable mesh? Is that what you did with your Brain Amplifer project? I was under the impression that you exported it into Modo to render it in Modo.... That's the much more "mainstream" and normal method for MoI exports - to render them, not to sub-d them. The current mesher is very good at producing renderable meshes, it's what it is designed to do.

Why would you convert stuff like your control panel machinery models into sub-d shapes? I don't understand why you would not just render the mesh that you got from MoI. That requires 0 extra steps and no negating of the benefits of NURBS modeling whatsoever...


Normally if you want to create a sub-d friendly mesh you will need to create the entire mesh in a sub-d program that has a sub-d specific workflow and UI.

When you apply sub-d smoothing to a mesh, it alters the shape, the subdivided result is kind of melted down from the original control hull. So it is a bit of a strange workflow to build your object out of smooth NURBS surfaces, but then intend to take that result, dice it into rough polygons (pretty big shift from NURBS at this point), then take it somewhere else and smooth it again in a different way to morph the shape some more... Of course it could be useful but it is a rather weird sequence of stuff to apply to your geometry.

To get the best results with sub-d you really need to have some specific kinds of topology layout to it and it tends to work best to guide that topology by hand, not by an automatic process. Of course, that's a big reason why sub-d modeling actually takes quite a bit of time and experience to become proficient in.

- Michael