I think for architecture MoI is fine and a perfect choice.

If your interested in modelling vehicles you'll need a good polymodeller due to the complex compound shapes involved, MoI really doesn't have the toolset (currently) to make this a easy task. If you interested in simplifying the shape of vehicles MoI would be fine for that.

I doubt you'll find a easy rendering engine as this is a complex area. Vray is certainly one of the best and almost the standard used by architectural visualisers. I found it pretty easy to use but I'm quite familiar with Mental Ray and its materials so switching to vray is in many ways similiar.

Thank you, all - you've all given me some good ideas on where to go from here. :)

I disagree with the cars comment. Anything hard surface is a lot easier using nurbs and I think MOI should be able to handle it fine . I think polys and subd's are nightmares when trying to cut holes in surfaces while trying to maintain the overall smoothness of the surface.
If you want the ultimate render quality/speed ratio I would go with Fryrender. Easy to set-up and use, great library of pre-existing materials, rhino-plug-in, unmatched unbiased quality at great speed (given a decent rig of course)

If free apps is what you want there is quite a list of things that you can try out.
Moi 3d will cover your nurbs work..
Kerkythea is an excellent render engine and I do most of my renderings in there its also very easy to use.
If you want a full 3d software and dont get around Blender that fast you can use the now free Truespace 7.6.
It also has 2 render engines incorporated Lightworks and Virtuallight.
Then there is Wings3d which is a very basic but also pretty easy to use polygon modeler.
But on top of all that there is Sketchup from Google which also comes in a free version and can be rendered in Kerkythea too.
The Moi 3d beta now also exports to Sketchup which is a great bonus !
So you see there are pretty many options all free and most very easy to use and learn...
Peter

>I disagree with the cars comment. Anything hard surface is a lot easier using nurbs and I think MOI should be able to handle it fine.

In theory what you said is spot on. I practice that is another whole different story which you can really only understand by having a go at modelling one yourself.

Yeh it can be done but it is far more timeconsuming than polymodelling and then converting it all to a nice smooth clean mesh (so you can render it) is another whole set of problems which takes a lot of additional time to solve for each part. That is why you see very few car or aircraft models (that are accurate to the original design) that are done with Rhino or MoI. Nurbs is Ok for concept cars because you design your car to suit what Nurbs like to do rather than try to capture all the subtle curves involved in the design of a Ferrari or Porsche etc

As previously discussed with Michael Gibson in other threads, Cars and Aircraft really fall into the realm of organic modelling for which polymodelling is better suited than Nurbs. You can only understand why that is once you have a go at modelling a car or aircraft that captures all the subtle shapes and curves of the original design with Rhino or MoI.

Hi Kevin,

I have to disagree with you there, it's all dependent on the tool set you have in you modeling program.
All car manufacturers use NURBS to model every component in a car accurately, ready for manufacturing.
I don't think car manufactures use poly, maybe right at the beginning in concept stage for styling purposes.

---------

Hi Kevin, car or aircraft models can often be pretty sophisticated shapes with a lot of variation and subtle changes throughout the shape, as you certainly know.

It tends to be a difficult type of model to work with just in general, no matter which mechanism or software you choose to do it in...

But several things can depend on the specific goals and desired output. That's why I was asking for some actual images or samples of what the original poster was interested in doing.


If you're trying to do a highly detailed "reverse engineering" type job where you're going to be constantly making a lot of small adjustments to localized areas of the shape, that kind of a thing does tend to fit much more in the "organic sculpting" type workflow which suits subd modeling a lot better. Of course that doesn't mean that it is automatically an easy thing to do it in sub-d, a beginner should still be prepared to spend quite a long time refining the particular skill set to make that work well.


Another interesting aspect is that actual manufactured cars themselves are designed using a combination of physical clay models and NURBS software. But designing something to be manufactured tends to be a significantly different process than modeling with a focus on rendered appearance only instead.


I would certainly agree that MoI tends to be more suited for doing concept style work rather than detailed replica modeling.


There are actually several examples of different vehicles that have been done with MoI in the Gallery on the web site, some links:

http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=156
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=120
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=112
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=106
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=93
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=98
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=73
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=47
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=39
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=16
http://moi3d.com/gallery/viewitem.php?id=4


This does tend to be an area that can cross easily into the "organic modeling" realm though, certainly.

- Michael

>All car manufacturers use NURBS to model every component in a car accurately, ready for manufacturing.
>I don't think car manufactures use poly, maybe right at the beginning in concept stage for styling purposes.

Hi Danny

I'm well aware of that. I'm talking about modelling up a car in MoI or Rhino (which is what this thread is about) that looks like the real thing. In order to create all the subtle curves of a car would require a patchwork of nurbs surfaces. MoI does not contain tools to keep those patchwork of surfaces tangent to each other. Rhino does have those tools but using them is a time consuming tedious process that takes the Rhino car guys about 10 times longer to create the car than using a good polymodeller.

If MoI or Rhino had the ability to sculpt nurbs surfaces (tsplines) then creating cars would be a lot easier. But if your going to spend $1500US on Rhino and Tsplines you might as well work with a polymodeller which many are free and save yourself the hassle and time of converting your beautifully crafted nurbs model to a nice clean smooth mesh.

Having said all that we still don't know what the original post "vehicles" really means. I am assuming he is talking about modelling cars but could be dead wrong about that. If it is fantasy vehicles or concept cars then MoI would be fine for that because you design it to suit the software rather than have to reverse engineer a Ferrari or Porsche design.

If you gave me all the curves from the original ferrari model, MoI could surface it. The problem becomes trying to draw the correct curves from a picture or sparce, minimal layout, and get the tangency you speak of from inappropriate curve layouts. And the guy that modeled the car in the firstplace didnt do it in a couple day's or weeks. So the idea that it would take a long time seems about right.

Burr

Yep your quite correct but nearly all people building models of real life objects do not have the original blueprints from the manufacturer even if they do still exist somewhere. They are nearly always working from photos and inaccurate line drawings. So Michaels comment above is what you are trying to do which is constantly tweak the shape so it looks about right and nurbs is not the right choice for that kind of workflow.

For reverse engineering. If I am the creator, then Nurbs are the best tool for that situation. My curves will be my curves.

Hi Burr,

> If I am the creator, then Nurbs are the best tool for that situation.

Well, it depends on what you are trying to model...

So far in this thread no specific kinds of shapes have been shown or mentioned, so it is pretty much impossible to say whether NURBS would be best or whether something else would be best because the actual goal has just not been very clearly stated yet...

If you do have a model that is well defined by a set of profile curves, then NURBS generally works best for that kind of a thing.

If your model is more organic and less specific in form, it may not be very easy to define its shape clearly by profile curves. That's when polygon/subd style modeling methods tend to work well.

Which one is better depends on a variety of factors such as what kind of shapes are involved and what is the end purpose of the model.

- Michael

Hi all,

My area of interest is ships, and occasionally aircraft, inasmuch as they have a naval connection, with the idea of having the models turned into masters for resin castings using CNC milling and/or stereo lithography. I have been an infrequent user of Rhino for years and although happy with it overall I was never too happy with the lofting and sweeping of surfaces. I recently acquired Modo in order to try my hand on subd poly modelling but so far I found it to be far from what I feel compfortable with and the learning curve seems rather steep. However I am impressed by the rendering capabilities of Modo and I will stick to it, so that my models can be turned not only into CNC masters but also into illustrations, although I realise that there might be quite a lot of work for that to happen.

I discovered MoI at about the same time, mostly because the Rhino mesher is so bad and MoI’s seemed so much superior. I found MoI so appealing with its brilliant user interface that I bought it as well. I just love the way it works, and I have started building models with it, while keeping Rhino in the background. MoI’s lofting and sweeping seems to work much better for me than Rhino’s.

Here are examples of recent WIP models. These are made in Rhino, but they give a good idea of what I expect from MoI. For my purpose, a NURBS modeller is the tool of choice, but nice rendering is an attractive option too.

Hi JPB, some great looking results there!

Yeah from what you are showing there I would think that NURBS would be a better mechanism for you.


> I recently acquired Modo in order to try my hand on subd poly
> modelling but so far I found it to be far from what I feel compfortable
> with and the learning curve seems rather steep.

Yeah, I think it is quite easy to underestimate the learning curve required to get proficient in sub-d modeling.

One thing that is really nice with NURBS modeling is that it is able to leverage a strong element of working with 2D curves. In sub-d modeling you tend to be forced to work with a sea of 3D points more directly. They have tools for helping you to work with a large number of points, but it is a fairly difficult skill to master and it is not similar to many other kinds of tasks that you may have done before (unlike 2D curve drawing).

I've often seen people watch a 1 minute video that shows an experienced sub-d artist making a really cool monster head in about a minute starting from a box, then they think that the sub-d package is going to make it easy for them to do the same thing. But what they were really seeing there are a whole lot of advanced skills that took that artist a long time to develop...


At any rate, Modo is a pretty cool thing to have in your toolbox for rendering even if you're not going to be doing sub-d modeling. And if you do end up with a project that is better aligned to sub-d then you can dig more into learning that workflow at that point.


For the right kind of project (especially characters, faces, organic stuff like that), definitely subd is the better tool for it, but you also need to be prepared to make an investment of time with it.

- Michael

>If you gave me all the curves from the original ferrari model, MoI could surface it.
Sorry they are not the original and they need alot of work/corrections, but if someone could show me how to model just the bumper I would be more than happy. To make It easier I'm not looking for Class A Surfaces...
I can do a Lamborghini but not this one "Lol"

Hi Yannada, generally car modeling is a highly complex task. You should be prepared to spend quite a lot of time working with different techniques and studying tutorials to make progress on that.

Some links to help you get started:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1267.16
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=898.2
http://www.carbodydesign.com/tutorials/?id=1196

I think there was also some kind of book printed a few years ago about car modeling using Rhino, that may be worth checking out as well.

- Michael

Also, this is the same problem that kevjon runs into when hes faced with not being able to do his model with "NURBS".

The curves in your file when viewed with anything other than top view look like this



which in no way have anything to do with a bumper. So you'll be left with making that part up. The original ferrari plans had the curves there in their entirety, but took a long time to get them there, and therefore could create the surface you see on the car.

Reverse engineering a car from curves like this would be next to impossible, but you could get a good approxamation with Sub-D, it just wouldnt be true.

I'm not a car designer but same theories of Surface construction applies to products I design. look an iPhone for example, most people think is a brick with some fillets apply to it, for sure is not. surface curvature continuous modeling even applies to something as simple as the iPhone.
Anyhow I wish you had the time to wright some tutorials addressing topics like: G2 or G3 continuity, Tolerance settings etc.

As I said they are not the original and they need alot of work/corrections. (first you need to move views in place) Anyway is a free .eps from the net. to me is only good for some architectural drawing "Lol"

Also my two cents on Nurbs over Subds ( except if you can put your hands on Imagine and Shape from Catia)

>Also, this is the same problem that kevjon runs into when hes faced with not being able to do his model with "NURBS".

Complete nonsense.

Yanada
If you want to capture the look of that Ferrari get yourself a good polymodeller such as Modo.