Michael,

I have review the 2007 posts on this subject. For clarity once again...

I want to be able to convert back and forth between Modo and MoI. Getting into Modo from MoI is easy. How about the reverse?

There is a software available from SYCODE (http://www.sycode.com/products/mesh_to_solid/index.htm) that appears like it would do the trick.

Is there another/better way to do this?

Thanks Very Much.

Greg

Hi ghan,

I did some research on that area few months ago, if you are talking about how convert sds models into nurbs one, there are few solutions:

- Tspline (for rhino or maya) can convert sds cage into a t-spline version. The result is pretty clean, but out of prize for me. The cool
thing is that t-splines support non rectangular topology, the bad thing is that you still have to convert them into nurbs to use them in MoI or Rhino.
But you have a good control of the patch continuity when converting the cage object, that will help to smooth the result even better.

- Maya can also convert sds into nurbs, you don't have the same smoothness that tspline>nurbs solution, but it might be quite usable for some work.


The software you're talking will 'only' convert poly's into nurbs plane if I understand, so you lost the sds part, you only get the cage object rebuild with nurbs plane. There is a command in rhino (_MeshtoNurbs if I remember) than will more less do the same ... I use it to import some draft model as reference, nothing more.

Waiting the day that MoI will import a poly cage object and convert them into a nurbs vesion like maya can do :) ... that would allow an amazing workflow and a great connection between the two worlds ^^

Yes,

Would be a great addition to a great software (MoI) !

Thanks for the information.

ghan

I demoed sycode and the resulting object was less than desirable for me.

Hi Greg, yeah MoI is not currently set up to do modeling work directly on poly mesh object data.

I mean like you have seen it can export that kind of data easily, but not import that data currently as a built in function.

For the export, as you have seen it will dice the larger smooth NURBS surfaces that are used in MoI into smaller facets to export as polygons. But it is not particularly easy to "undice" things to go back in the other direction though, sort of like how you can smash up apples to make applesauce but you can't really take some applesauce and then make apples back from that again. Well, actually you can go in the backwards direction but it is not easy and requires really fancy reverse engineering software such as Geomagic.


Then trying to bring in Sub-d specifically is kind of a different sort of a thing than trying to bring in just a non-sub-d frozen mesh object.

For sub-d conversion I would definitely think that your best current bet would be Rhino with the T-splines plugin like PaQ mentioned.


Bringing sub-d data into CAD programs is kind of a new emerging area, it is something that will probably become more common over the next 5-10 years or so but is only covered by a few things now, T-splines is the most approachable one right now I think.


But in general things are pretty much set up that you would only go in the MoI to Modo direction and not really in the reverse direction currently.


- Michael

Ok,

I appreciate the feedback.

I think Modo and MoI are two of the best CAD programs I have ever worked with. I appreciate all your efforts on MoI.

Thanks,

Greg

Amapi also had the ability to convert an SDS to a smooth Nurbs, BUT it could only handle about 100 polygons before crashing, and they were static objects. Not dynamic like a tspline. I've converted up to 80,000 faces in TSplines. So I think Amapi was doing some hacky reiterative patch solution and was not very efficient... But if you need a cheap converter for low-poly models only, you might still find it useful. But Amapi is pretty much deadware now...

jonah