Hi Shaun, I guess I kind of look at that older style Patch modeling as a somewhat of a dead-end compared to sub-d modeling.
One problem is that I think you only get tangent continuity with that kind of a system, not curvature continuity. That basically means that you have kind of one level of smoothness but if you make the surface reflective you will probably see that the reflections don't look smooth because of the lack of curvature continuity.
Also the process of editing points directly on corner junctures like that tends to introduce bulges and a kind of bunching near the edges of the full surface - I think it's quite a bit harder to get really smooth flowing larger surfaces under that kind of editing as compared to sub-d cage editing.
There was a company that was working on producing a CAD modeler using a kind of similar technique though, with a few added twists (like any number of sided patches I think), you might want to check it out: http://www.freedesign3d.com/ I'm not sure if it is still under development or not though, it seems to have run out of steam.
But making a new toolset for an alternate style of 3D point cage oriented modeling will be a lot of work, so probably nothing will happen in that area for a while yet. Then when I do get a chance to focus on it, I think it would be hard to justify sinking in a large effort on that kind of area instead of sub-d modeling...
Back quite a long time ago there were also some free stand-alone tools for doing that kind of patch modeling as well, I think it was called hamapatch? http://www.eatonhand.com/images/spatch.htm I'm not sure if those are still around anymore. You can kind of see in the link here that the models have a kind of bulgy/ridgy nature to them, which is fine for some kinds of modeling like cartoon characters but not such a great quality for product design.
- Michael
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