Hi Colin,
> As my understanding of all this stuff slowly grows, I'm starting
> to think I'll need to consider getting T-Splines as part of my
> workflow.
T-Splines could definitely have a place in your workflow, but I'm not so sure it would be the right tool for the kind of texture that you are showing in that particular OBJ example file above.
With T-Splines you are going to be working with a cage of control points, and to make it easier to control things you'll probably want that cage to be somewhat sparse.
The thing that is nice about T-splines (and sub-d modeling in general) is that everything within the cage stays very smooth and melty looking, even if the cage does things like have a branching structure with things dividing and separating.
But if you want to have a dense level of "high frequency" texture like your example above, that is probably something that will work best to apply only in 3D-coat or ZBrush as more of the final stage in your process before you export to an STL.
So your process might be more like build some basic surfaces for the overall general shape in MoI, then convert into polygons, bring into 3D-Coat and apply detailing and textures in there, and from 3D-Coat you go directly out to STL.
For rendering purposes, often times those kinds of details are not really modeled at all and applied by shaders and textures which modifies shapes just at render time.
That kind of high density very bumpy texturized stuff just does not fit very well with NURBS, so once you get to that stage you are kind of in some different territory at that point.
But NURBS works great for doing "broad and smooth" kind of shapes that come together from 2D profile curves.
- Michael
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