Hi Michael,
Well I decided to get MoI, even if I fear this decision will keep me from taking the time to learn to use Rhino. I guess I will be using Rhino only for things I can’t do in MoI, but actually I will still primarily be using SketchUp.
I can imagine turning a faceted mesh surface into a one smooth Nurbs surface will need some serious coding. I wouldn’t mind an easy solution, and make the mesh becomes a big bunch of faceted Nurbs patches. I would only want it for reference, and maybe some Booleans.
Rather new to the whole Nurbs world I still don’t know exactly what you can and can’t do with them. Some simple stuff surprises me like; I can select an edge or face of a simple box, but I can’t move or rotate it (like I can in SketchUp). Is that difficult to implement with Nurbs?
I actually suggested SketchUp would add “Jell-O-mode” to the transforms. It would be similar to “soft-selection” transforms in some modellers: move (or rotate or scale) the top of a box, then define a distance for how rigidly you want the rest of the geometry to follow, and shaping would be like playing with jello Everyone has played with jello, right? No need for separate transform commands. (Somehow I think this would be easier with Nurbs, as you would need to add and reduce faces for this in a poly-modeller)?
Adding edges, moving them and push/pulling the new faces is a very fast way of modelling, which I would eventually like to see becoming possible in MoI.
Add the possibility of turning some faces (or edges) to be curved (tangent, G1, G2 etc.), thus turning the original surfaces and edges to a control cage, you could do very powerful box modelling (similar to T-Splines).
Oops, I guess I was rambling for a moment there, but this is such an inspirational product.
KIS, and think of new ways of making modelling more fun!
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