HI Tom, ok but you are aware that MoI is a NURBS modeler, right? So that's what it is primarily focused on.
If you're not interested in NURBS modeling then I find it confusing why you are here.
Sub-D is definitely useful and has its place particularly for organic shapes but for example the shape you
posted earlier is very easily constructed using NURBS modeling:
The strong area of NURBS is with models that are well defined using 2D profile curves.With mechanical shapes
it's sub-d that becomes a horrible kludge, instead of just being able to drill a hole through something you have
to manage a sea of points and become an expert in topology. And even if you fight your way through all that at
the end you don't have any kind of precision control over how exact of a circle you've got. With NURBS you just
do this:
Sub-d has a significantly higher learning curve, it requires developing spatial awareness skills that are
more like sculpting and wrangling points in 3D space. Forming shapes from 2D profile curves in NURBS
modeling is significantly easier for people to learn when starting from scratch. That's the reason why MoI exists.
re:
> Maybe one day MoI will do the same as Rhino does now, implement SubD as a native object format.
Yes, that is something I'm slowly working towards. That's the reason why I added a SubD to NURBS converter
in for MoI v4, to open the door for a using a hybrid modeling approach using SubD to create some organic
elements like say the base form of a helmet and then continue working on it using the regular NURBS toolset
to construct other components from curves and add details using booleans.
The Sub-d converter is a step towards that, in the future I do expect to add some sub-d modeling tools directly
into MoI as well, at a kind of basic level for doing fairly lightweight base shapes.
- Michael