Hi Brian,
> But have you noted the usually small time frame in Blender
> between an idea and a fullfillment?
Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.
For NURBS it is rather more the "no" case though - this is not even the first time that there has been some attempt at adding more NURBS features into Blender,
check out this discussion here from 2003 that is referring to an earlier idea and attempt at adding more NURBS functions into Blender.
It's now 2010 - is that the kind of "small time frame" that you are referring to?
There are a couple of reasons why it is not very realistic to expect to see advanced NURBS functions in Blender.
One is that NURBS booleans and trimmed surface functions are very difficult to implement, if coding them from scratch it requires someone who has a lot of experience in that particular area, not just general coding experience, and even then it requires an investment of many years of work.
Another reason though is that Blender is focused more producing animation and graphics type projects and not very much on precise accurate product design type modeling which is what NURBS is more about. So there is a kind of mismatch in general toolset between those things.
> And, keep an eye on 3D Coat in that Nurbs area also.
Yeah, I think I've seen that he wants to add a NURBS import feature which would be interesting! The discussion thread for that in the 3D-coat forum is here:
http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=3052&st=0
But again - you may be getting confused - there's a big difference between importing NURBS and doing variable radius filleting modeling functions.
Just because a program implements one particular kind of NURBS feature does not mean it will suddenly have every single kind of difficult NURBS calculation included with it, which seems to be what you are assuming.
- Michael
