Hi Michael, you raise some interesting points here...
**Probably just that some people are more resistant to change or to trying things outside their current zone of experience... And that can be understandable, I mean it is a pretty different style of modeling that does need new skills to be developed**
But strange how 3D packages try to mimic the process with spline cages - But yes the fear of loosing business because you don't use specific tools is a real downer, as a lowly garden designer, first starting out I was frequently told I needed to use AutoCAD to remain within the industry standard. This is not the standard for my business just the standard used by architects. Back in those days DXF was the norm and DWG was struggling to get a foothold, showing exactly what you were saying .... An industry that is slow to adapt, they would rather stick with what they know works, and don't like to gamble on new technologies or methodologies until they are truly tested and main-stream, and even then, if it's going to cost to retrain staff the whole balancing of the spreadsheet and having a smiling accountant comes into play.
**Also NURBS kind of has a "bad reputation" in CGI circles just in general because of several reasons - a long time ago it used to be the standard method for doing any kind of smooth surfaces at all, including faces and characters but sub-d modeling has replaced it for those kinds of tasks, and when that happened a lot of people in that particular industry seemed to take that to mean that "NURBS are obsolete" when in other industries like stuff involving manufacturing they were never obsolete. Also the NURBS toolsets in many of the long existing animation packages like 3DS Max, Softimage, etc... are very old and don't really give a very good example the strong points of NURBS, so that helps to perpetuate that obsolete idea. **
What a beautiful paragraph that is. I am not sure about this, but I have been involved with CAD packages for nearly 20 years, and about 10 of which with NURBS, and as far as I am aware of, Spiderman is still the only character that was NURBS modelled in Rhino. The sad thing is, there are very few real "Sub-Divisional surface modellers" out there. The vast majority of the Sub-D work being actually left by tools like Modo and 3DSMax etc. One of the problems here is that when NURBS are translated to polygons, most people, myself included at times, will try and keep the resultant file small, this in return means a poly model that is not well defined and needs the assistance of Sub-D to look good. That's where the next problem arises, some parts will need more division than others, and then it makes for extra work by the rendering team. MoI mesh export is good and is very close to a "natural" hand crafted mesh, but those early exports by packages of old had done the damage and created tight edges and loops which were a nightmare to work through. N-Gons have helped a lot in these cases, but again, they are not well supported by many rendering packages. Those same rendering packages that have such primitive NURBS support and tool-sets that they are laughable. In reality NURBS is still progressing - MoI for example still has many features in the pipeline for being implemented, those polygon modelling packages don't seem to be introducing anything really new to the modelling aspect, more changes are in the render engines used and UI changes as they try to struggle more and more features into their packages to remain at the top of their tree, but the little part that does the modelling remains pretty much the same, so I guess it's the polygon modelling packages that are in reality antiquated.
** It can be amazing for me to see the amount of struggling people will go through trying to model something with circular holes in it using sub-d modeling... I think I remember one thread over on the Modo forum where you told someone that the thing they were struggling with would only take 20 seconds to do in MoI and they didn't seem to totally believe you and asked you to post a video and I think it was literally 20 seconds in your video, not "time lapse" or sped up like those zbrush demo videos always are... **
And this paragraph says why I use NURBS, as much fun as it is to rotate arcs and bezier curves and to play with end snaps etc, those free flowing curves that NURBS modelling offers is just not do able in poly line and polygon modelling packages, MoI gives the best of both worlds, speedy 2D for my design work, with 3D tools for my hobby side of things. But the transfer from 2D drafting to 3D still seems alien to me, now if MoI can fix that, I will truly have it all.
Sorry to ramble so much, but i had a sudden rush of emotions that needed to be expressed, Michael, thank you so much for producing a wonderfully efficient package with a price that's realistic too!!
Martin Spencer-Ford
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