> True. But, I've recently I've witnessed a slight shift away from NURBS modelling
> back to poly-modeling in the form of Sub-division surfaces (in Maya, Modo and
> a bit in 3ds Max).
Yeah, I think this has been a growing trend for several reasons. For younger people, Sub-D kind of has a greater "cool" factor since it works well for creating monsters and creatures. There's also been more of a general wider surge of innovation and new products focused on sub-d methods.
Newer products can tend to have a more modern user interface and can attract more users because of that.
There hasn't really been any accessible new NURBS modelers come out during the past few years, well except for MoI of course! :)
So I think that those are some of the reasons for this type of a shift. But I'm also seeing a lot of people now sort of "rediscovering" what NURBS modeling is useful for with the introduction of MoI and its focus on ease of use.
> Sub-D models are often in the end indistinguishable from NURBS models though
> the workflow can definitely be more "sculptural" as you have noted.
In certain senses the Sub-D workflow can actually require a higher learning curve, I think it tends to require a somewhat higher degree of spatial visualization since you are often manipulating so many different individual points in 3D space.
> With Moi, it currently seems that speed and intuitive informality with which one
> can work with NURBS geometry may perhaps lead to increased iterations of
> design study.
Yeah, especially for V1 the focus is on speed and fluidity - I like to say making it simple to do simple things.
> If you can model complex geometry more painlessly, then you
> can simply draw more of it to analyze and evaluate from whatever design
> criteria you are operating on.
Well, the first step for MoI is the focus on more simple geometry right now. Complexity can still be achieved in a sort of different sense - by a combination of more simple individual parts. NURBS tends to lend itself to this kind of combinatory approach since it has good support for boolean and trimming type operations.
Eventually there will be a trend in NURBS modeling that will combine some of the workflow of Sub-D modeling, but producing a patchwork of NURBS surfaces from the control cage, rather than a polygon output surface. You can see the beginnings of this trend in Catia's new Industrial Design Sub-d modeler, and the T-Splines stuff. I think that 4 or 5 years from now this will probably be more mainstream and you'll see some more cross-over feature sets.
The only thing I'm not so sure about is how feasible it is to combine both sets of tools (sculptural and drawing) in one application and still maintain a really simple and approachable UI. For the time being I'm intending to solve this problem by focusing more on the drawing + construction type workflow rather than sculptural/squishing type.
- Michael
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