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