Michael,

you know I have difficulty explaining things in english but I understand perfectly (this time) that TSpline does what it does using a polygonal approach. I also understand TSpline can "translate" those Poly surfaces to Nurbs surfaces that are joined in such a way (g2 continuity I believe) that the resulting object is nice and smooth. That in itself would be just great if Moi (or some other stand alone program) could do that. I know, I dreaming awake again.

Though it works on poly, some TSplines command seem to do things that we could do in Moi as well but with much less ease and many more steps. For example, if I'm not mistaking Moi's boolean commands do quite a lot of stuff in the background, like findind intersection, trimming, deleting some surfaces and joining back what's left. You said yourself that you'd like to improve the blend and network commands (amoung others), even if we forget about TSpline, I just wonder if the idea of a Moi "super" command could create a Nurbs surface over this network of curves for example.





Again, this is just an example, here from the set of curve in red, I wonder if this dino looking thing could be done in Moi using a single command (from the user perspective) just as it can be done in TSpline.

Those images come from the TSpline manual, I just hope I won't have problems.





Here again another example, I did most parts of this in Moi and used another program to add some details and smooth things out a bit. It's no longer a Nurbs object so I'm stuck with using some other program to put this in its place, in this case another object I designed in Moi. I know it's my problem but I just hate having to use anything else then Moi. By the way, TSpline can't convert this to Nurbs either, it's most likely it would be a pain to convert this back to Nurbs anyway. I might as well take the big bad tasting pill and do what's left in a poly program. Not only this but every time I'll want to reuse this model, I'll find myself doing a new model Moi, I'll have to export it and do what's left to be done outside of Moi again.




To sum it up, it's not really TSplines I'm interesting in but the main idea that we could possibly have more "powerful" commands in Moi, lets say "inspired" by say the kind of things the tsPipe command can do and of course it could be any other idea from any other program as well.

Thanks,
Felix

>To sum it up, it's not really TSplines I'm interesting in but the main idea that we could possibly have more "powerful" commands in Moi, lets say "inspired" by say the kind of things the tsPipe command can do and of course it could be any other idea from any other program as well.

Hi Felix,

your wish reminds me of the very old Electric Image NURBS Modeler (EIM) which probably would do what you are after.
It was an ACIS based NURBS modeler and had those ÜberNurbs tools included which allowed a user to model in a NURBS
environment with "SubD box modeling technique" too. EIM could import however no polygon meshes like Rhino/TSplines etc.
does, but you could convert/export those ÜberNurbs as surfaces or solid in .iges and .step format. It had also advanced
surfacing tools like "matching" surfaces etc.

But as i understand, like Michael said, it would be a big undertaking and i also assume, in case we ever would get something
similar in MoI what you propose, that the price tag of MoI would be getting pretty high, which probably not all users would like...

Here's a small image of the UI of EIM showing an ÜberNurbs object, dated back from 2002. EIM was last bundled with EIAS
5.0 (Electric Image Animation System).



Hope my reply is not to much off-topic!

Regards
Stefan

Eim
It was the favorite tool of Cristobla Vila ;)
http://www.etereaestudios.com/
see this thread A moment of Inspirations
http://moi3d.com/forum/messages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5263.1 ;)

Hi Felix,

> I also understand TSpline can "translate" those Poly surfaces to Nurbs surfaces that are joined
> in such a way (g2 continuity I believe) that the resulting object is nice and smooth. That in itself
> would be just great if Moi (or some other stand alone program) could do that. I know, I
> dreaming awake again.

That would indeed be great to have that function in MoI, but what I've been trying to describe is that there is quite a lot of work involved to get just that function working so it is not something that is likely to happen anytime soon.

It's just a fact of life that things that require a lot of work and time to accomplish are not easy for me to work into my schedule, I only have 24 hours in the day! :)

For the time being MoI is focused on a different style of workflow than the type of stuff that you are showing - at this time MoI is simply not the right tool for the job for these kinds of things, you need a polygonal type modeling approach to do all these things you are asking about here. MoI is not right now focused on a polygonal type workflow.


> I just wonder if the idea of a Moi "super" command could create a Nurbs surface
> over this network of curves for example.

The main way that I would think to accomplish that kind of branching structure would be to form a polygon structure for it, but of course that requires all that type of polygon handling infrastructure that I've been mentioning will take a lot of work to include in MoI.


> Again, this is just an example, here from the set of curve in red, I wonder if this dino
> looking thing could be done in Moi using a single command (from the user perspective)
> just as it can be done in TSpline.

The exact same thing applies here as above - the main way that I could see to do that would be to use a polygon construction mechanism.

Basically all those T-spline specific examples that you are mentioning all are suited for a polygonal type construction approach, because that's the kind of technology and workflow that t-splines specifically targets.


> To sum it up, it's not really TSplines I'm interesting in but the main idea that we could possibly
> have more "powerful" commands in Moi, lets say "inspired" by say the kind of things the tsPipe
> command can do and of course it could be any other idea from any other program as well.

Felix, there's no doubt that there are a lot of cool concepts in Tsplines. The thing is they all revolve around the particular kind of polygon modeling workflow and mechanisms that t-splines is specifically focused on. It's a big area of stuff and MoI is not focused on that same kind of process. If you need that kind of process right now MoI is not the right tool for the job, if you need stuff that works best with a polygon modeling workflow then a polygon modeling program is the best fit for that.

Basically I don't see how I could replicate those kinds of tools that are entirely designed for polygon generation without having polygon based methods to do it. Somehow you seem to be asking "how can I do polygon modeling in a non-polygon modeling tool" ... The answer is that doing polygon modeling in MoI would require adding a bunch of polygon modeling/sub-d type tools and infrastructure.

I'm certainly glad that you like MoI so much that you want to do everything inside of it! :) But right now that's just not really possible - MoI is not currently focused on those particular styles of model creation, it's focused on a different style of modeling that works well for other kinds of objects than what you are showing here.

- Michael