Now this looks exciting, Moi and Modo working together

http://www.luxology.com/store/Power_SubD-NURBS/index.aspx

Looks nice indeed but a steep price...

Peace,
Rich_Art, ;-)

Am i missing something here or is this a money grab item. I can understand the need for Nurbs to be exported to mesh object - no matter the format, but I am at a loss why you would need to do mesh to Nurbs for the completion of adding detail, can't you just model the whole thing quicker in Nurbs and export to suit whatever rendering package you are going to use, especially when MOI is like sixty percent cheaper ?

I need enlightenment ?

Martin

I don't see anything highly sculptural in the examples for Subd-nurbs. I am looking for something that could take 10 million quads (or more) and make a nurbs object out of it.

There are a few products out there that can convert polys to nurbs. Some have the intent to use the polys as a control to modify the nurbs object in ways that are not easily achieved in cad program, and so are not designed to handle large numbers of polys.

What I'd like to is a detailed scan of an object with a lot of surface detail with millions of polys, converted to a nurbs object, and the time required to convert it. I am assuming even now there is no single mouse click that will do it.

For my purpose, accuracy is not as important, so I would trade speed or ease of conversion for greater accuracy.

Neither for me. Hardsurface modeling I do completely in Moi3D. No need to hop between 2 apps.


Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

But look my little post for another cool solution ;)
http://moi3d.com/forum/messages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5090.1

"I don't see anything highly sculptural in the examples for Subd-nurbs. I am looking for something that could take 10 million quads (or more) and make a nurbs object out of it."

That's not the point of it at all but with Modo's new retopology tools you could easily create a more manageable mesh from that 10 million poly object and open that as a nurbs surface in Moi to add details. I agree that most of those samples aren't very inspiring but the handle is a good example. The basic shape would be difficult to sculpt in Moi and the detailing (holes and bevels) would be difficult to do in Modo. Now I'm sure some of you hardcore Nurbs fans would dispute the former (but I suspect not Mr Gibson after seeing several of his posts) and some poly pushers on the Modo forum would dispute the latter but this is exactly what I want. Look at it as T-Splines for Moi but I always found the modelling in T-Splines a bit sludgy compared to Modo which is very fast and fluid. Likewise I'll always get as far as I can in Moi before turning to Rhino so this is great for my workflow.

Hey Rich, nice slide-show on your web page dude. Is that your true client portfolio or was it just for fun practice stuff. I recognise a decent number of them.

Thanks very much. Yes, it's all work (I think).

Hi Rich,

> Now I'm sure some of you hardcore Nurbs fans would
> dispute the former (but I suspect not Mr Gibson after
> seeing several of his posts) and some poly pushers on
> the Modo forum would dispute the latter but this is exactly
> what I want.

Yup, I definitely agree that some kinds of models are better suited for sub-d modeling and some kinds of models are more suited for NURBS modeling.

Basically NURBS modeling tends to work best when much of the model can be described by a somewhat sparse amount of profile curves, often just 2D plan curves. This is often the case for mechanical man-made type objects.

But often times organic models do not boil down to a small set of curves very well - like for example with a human face you can have a silhouette profile curve of the face, but that curve does not actually "define" the shape, it only captures it at one single spot and the shape changes rapidly in numerous different ways (with little bumps and indentations, etc...) as it moves away from there. So models like that tend to be better suited for the type of 3D point cage manipulation workflow of sub-d modeling.

So ideally it is best to use the right tool for the particular job at hand, and this new tool will certainly help for cases where there is actually some combination of both elements within a single model.

The only tricky part about that is that sub-d modeling I think tends to have a somewhat higher learning curve, you have to kind of wrangle more data (more points) to use it, and work more in 3D and not in 2D and so it's just somewhat more complex overall. So it's not all that surprising when someone doesn't particularly want to learn it because it can be a pretty big investment of time and practice to get good at it.

- Michael

Hi Michael

Yes, I wouldn't imagine someone who has always nurbs modelled would pick up Modo just for this. In my own case, I started in 3d before SubD's existed, using FormZ to build objects very specifically, not unlike the Moi workflow but still in polygons and endlessly hitting a brick wall when all my cuts and trims finally made the mesh fail in a way you couldn't fix in those days. Then along came SubD's where you could build very loosely and magically hit the smooth button and everything looked beautiful but it was still a simple enough cage that you could easily fix any little holes or errors. It seemed like the only way to model from then on but I grew increasingly sick of building a beautiful organic object and then wanting to just punch a hole in it and having to reflow all the polys to maintain quads and stop surface errors. That brought me to Moi and it's lovely booleans and blends.

Since then I've hopped between Modo and Moi but now it seems I won't have to look at a job and think "Is this a Moi or a Modo" - it can be both. I'm really happy about this, let's see if it works as advertised!

"That's not the point of it at all but with Modo's new retopology tools you could easily create a more manageable mesh from that 10 million poly object and open that as a nurbs surface in Moi to add details."

True, if we are using it as a control cage.

I'm just waiting for something that will do this with very high poly objects so we can have high detail in a nurbs object. Its clear that there are no tools in the nurbs world (ie. ZBrush) for pushing around surfaces like they were clay, but if anyone is aware of something that can do this now, please clue me in.

I have also come across limitations with polygon models and machining, and its not the polygon format that is limiting, its the knowledge of the people in machining about the polygon format, but that's a whole different ball of wax.

Hi Chris,

> Its clear that there are no tools in the nurbs world (ie. ZBrush)
> for pushing around surfaces like they were clay, but if anyone
> is aware of something that can do this now, please clue me in.

The only thing that really comes to mind is the sensable system: http://www.sensable.com/ although I don't think it pushes NURBS surfaces around directly, it's something like pushing around voxels and then fitting NURBS to it at the end or something along those lines.

Usually stuff that focuses on pushing stuff around tends to be polygon based because it's easier to add refinement to just one area of a model with polygons. NURBS surfaces always have a rectangular control net to them and so you can't just add in a single new vertex somewhere in the middle of a NURBS surface, you have to add in an entire row or column of them when you want to refine it with more points for more displacement control.

- Michael

"...The only thing that really comes to mind is the sensable system: http://www.sensable.com/ although I don't think it pushes NURBS surfaces around directly, it's something like pushing around voxels and then fitting NURBS to it at the end or something along those lines...."

We have a few Sensable devices at the office. There's no importing of or using Nurbs for sculpting, that's purely voxels as u mentioned. The software does have a few Nurb-ishy surfacing commands similar to network, loft, etc. But the end result is always voxels, and ultimately exported as a mesh...

Regarding models converted from subd to nurbs - the topology of the converted models is often not ideal to work with downstream as the individual sub-surfaces are always untrimmed rectangular surfaces. They have a tendency to get pinched near the corners and this can make it difficult to add local features without first reworking those regions if your new feature crosses those pinched regions. Not sure how IW's converted results are constructed but I imagine it's similar to Tsplines in nature. Although they claim at least C2 along all edges, while Tsplines corners were only C1. I'd be interested to see IW's output and see if it fairs better (look ma, I made a funny!)...

jonah

This looks promising http://www.geometrysystems.net/default.htm

I need to get an evaluation copy to see if it actually works as well as my interpretation of their marketing info leads me to believe.

hmm... This copied from the News section of their website :

"...Please visit GSI in booth #1643 at SIGRAPH 2003 in San Diego..."

Not sure I'd hold my breath for that demo! :P

Yes I did see GSI's site needs some major updating. It doesn't give you a warm fuzzy about the company when their website info is nearly 10 years out of date.

I also wonder that if the product was really good, I would have heard about it more often. I only found them through a search rather than anyone's recommendation.

But it may be worth a look.

The attached image shows a Silo Base Man mesh exported from Modo Power SubD-NURBS with default settings
as a 3DM file and opened in MoI. This gives an idea of the default patch creation, which can be modified by the
use of materials in Modo.

FYI: The MoI file is approx. 14 MB., the original OBJ export from Silo was about 125 KB. ;)

I've been wanting to get a basic male/female body into moi :) I know MoI not suited for organic stuff, if I could find a program around the same cost has MoI (or cheaper) where I could do the organic stuff then bring it into MoI to finish off, I'll be happy.

I'm find programs like Hexagon to hard to drive then can't import the results into MoI anyway.. I even tried importing a mesh into MoI and manually create surfaces for every triangle, gave up after adding the surfaces to 1/2 a hand :)

I find it interesting to see the patches created in the conversion process. I guess you could
maybe simplify the hands and use a human figure with a screen capture in MoI as a size
reference but most of the time you would be round tripping to a poly program to render anyway.
Might be handy if you have a program like Viacad Pro etc. that renders NURBS.

I think this process works best with fairly simple SDS shapes that you add hard surface details to
and mesh to export.