Hi Andy, thanks for the sample file - looking at that file it seems that it just has the regular polygon face entities in there so that's good to know that it doesn't need to be a different kind of object.

> Another thought I had was sweeping a small circle
> along all the curves... and then exporting it as regular
> geometry. That might be a lot of work though.

This could be a possibility, but one thing to watch out for is that a long tube with a small diameter in NURBS tends to be pretty heavy geometry, it makes a really tightly curved little thing. It's easy for things like the file size to balloon very significantly if you have a whole lot of little tightly curved things like that.

But as far as creating the little tubes, you can use sweep in a kind of batch mode with a lot of curves by drawing the circle off to the side away from the curves (it should be outside of the bounding box around them all), and then when selecting rails select all the curves all at once, that will do a 1 rail sweep around each of them with "auto place" mode so that you don't have to position the circle around each curve individually.

That looks something like this:





To select all edges as sweep rails you can select 1 edge of a solid and then do Ctrl+A to then make all its edges selected, or you can use the the Scene Browser Types section to select all edges in the entire model in 1 click.

But again, this method may get pretty unwieldy in data size if you're going to do it to hundreds of things.

- Michael

Yeah it sounds like that might be a solution for simple objects, but for what I have in mind it would probably become pretty unwieldy.

So it sonds like the solution right now for stills is to do what PAQ did, and do a render overlay by matching up the MOI viewport with my Modo camera.

For animation it sounds like I am out of luck, unless I can find a .skp importer for modo that will import the poly lines.

Again thanks for all your help.

Andy

Just thought of another solution. I use 3D Max in conjunction with Modo. 3D Max will import several different types of nurbs objects, as well as .skp format. I could then export my camera from Modo to Max, render my curves in Max, and then overlay them in post. I will try it out when I get a chance.

Okay my idea worked. I exported the moi object as an obj and brought that geometry into Modo. Then I deleted everything but the edges and curves, and exported that as an Iges file. I imported that into Max where I then exported them as splines back into Modo. Luckily the scale stayed consistent between all the import and exports and the splines lined up perfectly.

Granted this is a pretty simple object but I have faith that this will work with very complex objects as well. Animated Moi wireframe objects here I come. ;)

I'm glad you have a workable method Andy, I hope you'll post a link to some of your animations when you make them!

- Michael

Hi Andy,

What format are you using to export spline from 3dsmax to modo ?