Hello :).

MoI seems to be a very nice programm, especially to open STEP and IGS-files and export them to the 3d world. Very, very useful.

Since MoI is based on NURBS (right?) is there a possibility to export to Animation:Master (Patch / Spline-based modelling software) without using the polygone exporters (which always looses quality and is hard to import again)?

Thanks for any answer :)
See you
*Fuchur*

A quick check of the Animation Master forum shows this question about MoI nurbs was asked in 2010.
It gives a Rhino link regarding this question. But it talks about wireframes and DXF, also N-gons.

http://zandoria.wordpress.com/tutorials/rhino-to-am-tutorial/

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=37284&hl=nurbs

- Brian

Hi Fuchur,

> Since MoI is based on NURBS (right?)

Yup, that's correct, surfaces in MoI are trimmed NURBS surfaces.


> is there a possibility to export to Animation:Master (Patch / Spline-based modelling software) without
> using the polygone exporters (which always looses quality and is hard to import again)?

If I remember correctly, the Animation:Master spline patches are not NURBS patches but instead their own specialized kind type of spline patch. So I don't know that there is any way to do a direct spline conversion without doing any conversion into polygons.

MoI does export NURBS surfaces to several industry standard formats like IGES, 3DM, and STEP file formats, if there was a way for Animation:Master to read NURBS as spline patches the normal way that those are transferred into other programs are for the other program to use one of these standard formats to read in the NURBS data.

So that's really something that you should ask the A:M people about, whether they intent to support reading in any of those file formats in the future.

I think that possibly A:M does not support having "trim curves" on its surfaces though, which is a major complicating factor for a direct conversion - usually CAD models are not only made up of NURBS surfaces, they're actually trimmed NURBS surfaces which have areas of them marked as holes or cut away regions. It's not enough to just support spline surfaces to get these models across, it needs trimmed surface support to get a direct transfer.

- Michael

Fuchur, you can just forget about this.
As Michael said we would need Hash to add support for importing and take it from me.... its not happening!
However as a user of both Moi and A:M I am curious as to why you are asking about this?
I don't see any obvious reason to meld these two programs.

Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

Hi there,
I am also using AM and MOI, and had the same idea. But what i was whishing for was to get AM models into MOI, since modeling in certain cases is much more intuitive in AM. As far as i can see, modeling in AM could be compared a bit with T-Splines, and just have a look what these guys are charging for their software. Beeing able to use and model in AM and in MOI quite well, I am certain, that the two of these programms would be a real winning team.
Best regards,
Heiner

Hi Heiner,

> I am also using AM and MOI, and had the same idea. But what i was
> whishing for was to get AM models into MOI

It's pretty much the same situation - MoI supports reading in surfaces from many common CAD formats: 3DM, STEP, SAT, and IGES. For transferring surface data into MoI, it's up to the other application to also support at least one of these industry standard formats for sharing surface data between programs.

So again that's a feature that you would need to ask A:M to support - to add surface export to any one of these CAD file formats. Also then their surfaces would work with numerous CAD programs actually and not just MoI alone.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
yeah, i got that, i just wanted to answer Fuchur, since i know him from the AM forums ;-).
However, I would love to be able to do modeling in MOI as in AM, again ;-)
Besides that, the more i work with MOI, the more I like it and the better i get!
Regards
Heiner