Yeah T-splines are awesome, I mean its just the logical continuity of nurbs. Ive played a lot with the Rhino plugin, Its buggy but you can do so complex shapes that are just impossible to do with patches of nurbs! Also from rhino you save your t-splines into 3dm and MoI open it, then you do booleans and fillets between two T-Splines volumes. Seemless integration. But it cost a lot for a plugin (559 if im right) + the cost of Rhino, and while Rhino is rock solid, the plugin is very buggy and crash a lot.
The other sad part is that very few software have them. At least cheap software (less than 2k)
MoI with T-Splines would just nuke any competition :D

And it will gain a hell lot of customers around the world :)

DesuDeus wrote: "The other sad part is that very few software have them. At least cheap software (less than 2k)
MoI with T-Splines would just nuke any competition :D And it will gain a hell lot of customers around the world :)"

TSplines might sell more licenses if a host app were available for $300 instead of $800. But Rhino has a lot more exposure, so it probably balances in the end. Of course any developer would be interested if a plugin could bring new customers to their app. But as Michael mentioned, he's not ready to support plugins yet. Also there are many Rhino functions which TSplines is using behind the scenes. MoI would need to have equivalent functions, otherwise Tsplines has to write their own code for it. They do this sometimes, but I'm sure they rather avoid it. Also MoI would need support for mesh objects. T-Splines uses Rhino's mesh object, but adds an extension to support T-points and creasing. The last (and probably most important) is that TSplines is not a simple plugin such as a render engine. I've been told that Tsplines is doing very sophisticated coding at a very low level in Rhino. Consider how they are able to take over Rhino's interface. McNeel had to develop this to support them. Probably MoI would need to do the same. I think it's a big piece of work and would slow down other development for MoI...

Also my feeling is they want to develop a very solid plugin to Rhino before porting to other applications. It would help them a lot to isolate problems if they only focus on Rhino. Also (this just my opinion) i think TSplines achieved only about 50% of their potential so far. Once they have the ability to support trimming, fillets, etc without collapsing to Nurbs then i think there will be a great interest among the big CAD developers. Also they need to improve the continuity around star points. V2 made a BIG improvement to have a minimum of C1. But for many companies, I'm sure they would need C2 at all points. TSplines is a young technology, and I think they will start expanding in a couple of years...

@ Jason - Sorry for derailing your thread! :)

jonah

Yeah continuity is always hard to have everywhere.
But if you do product visualisation T-Splines are perfect :D

Quoted from T-Slines forum.

Question: T-Splines For SolidWorks

Answer:(TomFinnigan T-Splines developer) I probably shouldn't go into too much detail about our discussions with other companies, but SolidWorks is certainly a company we've spoken with about T-Splines.

Currently the bulk of our development efforts are going towards improving the Rhino plugin and planning for new features. We'll let you know when they're available, but the big features will be exciting for any application that includes T-Splines. Rhino is a good app to develop new features in, because of the simple SDK and McNeel's excellent developer support.

Another thing we're spending time on is improving the documentation and (free) learning materials, which I'm sure you understand the importance of.. :)

We'll be sure to post news here as soon as there is a commitment to include T-Splines in SolidWorks or any other app. Unfortunately, for now I could only speculate what will happen.


ps. Bob McNeel is one of the T-Splines Board of Directors.

I know all that neo.
Im just dreaming about using T-Splines inside MoI :)

I think it would be very interesting to see how Solidworks would implement something like TSplines. One would normally think of Tsplines as free-form. But i think the workflow could really benefit from the use of parametrics. Imagine picking any 2 points on a tspline and then using a dimension to drive it. I'm currently learning Solidworks, and not really a fan of the workflow. But i think with Tsplines it could actually be very cool...