Hi Metin, well you may want to hold off on an expensive purchase for this function for a couple months because there is a possibility it could show up in MoI v4. I don't know for sure yet though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

are you taking about the possibility of a function like ViaCAD or T-Splines has,
or a simpler solution like Max's subd script?

In case of the first one that would be super awesome!

Regards
Stefan

Hi Stefan, something more like the first one. But personally I'm more concerned with surface quality than with having a smaller number of larger surfaces.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

wow, that would be cool and i can understand your concern. Hopefully
all goes well, like you expect, in case it will make it into V4.

Best regards
Stefan

Hi Michael,

Wow, that would be a fantastically useful, much-desired addition to MoI, many thanks for letting us know!

Hi Alex,

Many thanks for your offer, much appreciated.

Right now I haven't got a model to convert yet. There's a possible new modelling job around the corner that would require high-poly to solid conversion, that's why I thought to do some preliminary research again.

It's exciting to read that Michael is considering adding such an option to MoI. That would make MoI a one-stop solution for polygons to NURBS and vice versa.

Hi Stefan,

Some types of models are hard to auto-retopologize. I've found that sometimes 3D-Coat's Autopo does a slightly better all-quads retopology than ZRemesher.

Here's a comparison I recently created about this subject:

https://www.metinseven.com/blog/Ag4W/3d-coat-vs-zbrush-auto-retopology-comparison

Very cool comparaison!

Not sure this following is exactly the same subject but...

http://topologyguides.com 5 pages!

https://giancr.com/en/essential-tips-hard-surface-small-details-part-01/ 3 Pages

Hi Metin,

maybe it is only me but i had never luck with getting better auto retopo
result with 3DCoat. I stay with ZBrush and fix later those little pole issues
with MoI.

Regards
Stefan

Thanks Pilou! I didn't know the second link yet. Good subdivision modeling advice is always useful.

Hi Stefan,

The auto-retopo results are very dependent on the mesh features. I do know that Autopo has been improved a lot since the first versions, and is now at least on par with ZRemesher.

Hi Michael,

If that means MoI will get a proper poly mesh importer that would be more than welcome too.
I have introduce MoI to a co-worker, he's formally a concept artist, and now he's modeling all day long since months, producing assets for one of our game.

He often receive polygonal mesh for reference, either simple blocking, but sometimes more advanced models done by other artist, and it's always a little bit tricky to have this data in MoI.
A 'fast' .obj loader just for mesh display (no edition) could help a lot, as for the moment we have to heavily decimate the data, the triangle to nurbs conversion is useless (for out needs) ... we just want to display it to build stuff around.

So if you find a way to add this feature in a 'sexy' way that would be awesome too :O)

Hi Michael,

I second PaQ's request for the ability to import mesh data for reference. Think of it as the 3D equivalent of the reference image functionality we already have. Apart from being able to translate/transform/scale such objects, I think it will be fine to have only a limited toolset to work with these models.

I don't know about snapping to vertices and so on, but that sounds interesting as well for some projects. Being able to intersect planes with meshes to derive curves would be useful too, I presume. But I'm getting ahead of myself here ... simple but efficient import and fast display of meshes alone would be a major thing already! It would make a lot of my work a lot easier.

In addition, having some subdivision-surface functionality in MoI, as you hinted at, sounds extremely interesting! Even more than the things you and me discussed over email last time ;-)

Thanks,

Fabien

Hi PaQ,

> If that means MoI will get a proper poly mesh importer that would be
> more than welcome too.

Sorry but no it wouldn't mean this at all, having polygon mesh objects that you could work with at modeling time is a totally separate thing. I'd like to have that at some point in the future but having certain kinds of objects that behave totally different from "regular" ones is a pretty big usability problem.

- Michael

Hi Fabien,

re:
> Being able to intersect planes with meshes to derive curves would be useful too, I presume.

Yeah this is the sort of "can of worms" that gets opened pretty quickly, I'm not very confident about operations with meshes being integrated into the existing tools. It would probably need its own dedicated toolset for reverse engineering tasks. That's just overall a pretty complex area that I haven't been focused on targeting with MoI.

- Michael