Thanks Mr MOI for the valuable insights into the strength and weaknesses of a Nurbs-modeller.
indeed I am in the grey zone between poly and nurbs with my current task - will do the work both in C4D and MOi to compare and evaluate the workflow - maybe post and example to see what the nurbsexperts have to say,.
Burr and Chip, do you stick to where MOI is shining (2D curves, boolean, etc) or do you work in the "greyzone" too, as Michael has called the area of "organic" shapes.

Btw, Michael, what about automotive design - a carbody is the fine art of joining many surfaces with different curvatures -precision required but at he same time deep inside the "greyzone" ?

Hey tom,
So "the grey zone" can be defined in different ways. There is also a black and white zone for me. Your elephant if in the white zone, has that helmut in the black zone. There is nothing about that helmut (or a car) that cant be done with NURBS... Although for patch modeling a car, you need a robust toolset. The helmut? Not so much. Also, your level of proficiency comes into play with the grey zone. Alot of NURBS guy may whip that helmut off pretty quick. Alot may struggle with parts. Etc.

A human face? Poly's for sure.

Hi Tom,

> Btw, Michael, what about automotive design - a carbody is the fine art of joining many surfaces with
> different curvatures -precision required but at he same time deep inside the "greyzone" ?

Well, there are some NURBS modeling programs such as Alias Studio that are focused on doing production automotive design using NURBS surfaces. It's also a super expensive program with a very high technical learning curve with a whole lot of difficult to use very specialized commands.

MoI is not focused on that type of use that requires a huge amount of technical training - MoI is much more focused on trying to make the strongest areas of NURBS modeling (again, mechanical design using 2D curves and booleans primarily) to be more user friendly to people without requiring an advanced math degree and a year of training just to operate the program. So MoI does not have the exact same NURBS toolset as Alias Studio for example - it has not been a priority to try and develop those exact same tools in MoI since it's not a fit with what MoI is trying to focus on.

I think it's likely that at some point in the future I'll try to expand MoI somewhat more into that territory and try to add more tools for matching surface continuity, but currently if matching surface curvature between a patchwork of NURBS surfaces is what you need to do, you would want to do that in a different NURBS modeling program such as Alias AutoStudio or Rhino with the VSR shape modeling add-on and not MoI. But those are complex and finicky tools to use so you should expect to spend a lot of time and energy going up a very steep learning curve before you would be very productive with them.

- Michael

You can make some car surfaces with Moi! ;)

Just make some tricky adjustments!



MOI- surface refiniment from M-dynamics on Vimeo.

I have a bit of a different take on the 'gray area.'

For the longest time, I felt it was just easier to use SubD modeling with polys to get what I wanted. I still prefer it for much more organic shapes which are 'eyeballed' for their form. Things like gloves, or soft goods, or cartoon characters are certainly better in a poly program which supports SubD modeling. Especially if it doesn't need to be 'exact.' This doesn't fit your helmet as it need accuracy, so I think NURBS would be best.

I really like SketchUp for poly modeling even though it's SubD packages aren't nearly as sophisticated as dedicated SubD programs like Modo or Lightwave Modeler or nVil. In particular I like it's ability to create quick interiors with instancing-- something MoI doesn't yet have. It also has the best sketch renderer on the planet.

But now I'm pretty much gonna start every project in MoI, move it to SketchUp for 'sketch renders,' and move it to KeyShot for final renders. It's just terribly faster starting in MoI. Unless it has to be a soft organic, I believe it can be faithfully executed in MoI. This includes vehicles as well.

Just so you understand, when Michael talks about 'surface continuity,' he's talking about a very esoteric subject, and one which is most difficult for all CAD Solid modelers to execute. Rhino needs a third party set of plugins. Alias has a decent implementation- in fact it's fairly intuitive and something I do hope Michael takes a look at implementing some day. For now, a 'good' MoI modeler can use some BLEND tricks with small NETWORKs to get pretty damn close. In fact, if you care to look, there have been some stellar car models created in MoI.

So, the trick is to eventually think in NURBS. A whole different strategy is required for modeling something like the helmet, but it's very possible, and I suspect much easier than you may think. Unfortunately, I'm in the middle of a big project or I'd like to take a shot at it and make a video tute. Maybe someday.

If you think about it, it's a symmetrical object, which has different parts which can be 'joined' or 'booleaned' together with fillets added along the seams. The main helmet should be rather simple to create with a few different surfaces --try taking a sphere, show the points and use the points to resize it. Once you have a decent top half, you can chop it up with different boolean curves.

The "gray area" is more "clear" since Maximilian Smirnov did SubD script and its sub-tools...(privet Max :) )
Hope you'll return into this scripts givin'us opportunity to delete splits or weld together two control points ;)
Thanks Max !

M

Thank you all for answering - I appreciate your helpful input, great forum here !

"For the longest time, I felt it was just easier to use SubD modeling with polys to get what I wanted. ....
But now I'm pretty much gonna start every project in MoI ... It's just terribly faster starting in MoI ..."

I tend to stick with subD mainly because I am just very at ease with my SubD modeller, but the more
I look at MOi the more i am fascinated how much power is hidden behind its minimalistic surface.

"So, the trick is to eventually think in NURBS. A whole different strategy is required for modeling"

This is the biggest challenge ... having worked for a long time with SubD my brain is programmed to think of
building up a model following a specific workflow - falling into the "SubD - trap again and again ;-)