Hi Sven,
> Problem is, that it is output as a high resolution mesh, as I
> cannot import NURBS into XSI (or can I?- not too sure on
> that one).
You actually can by saving from MoI as .igs format, there is some kind of IGS format importer in XSI.
However, the whole area of NURBS in XSI is really pretty old and as far as I know has not been upgraded or really touched at all in many many years. So it tends to be rather buggy, you are probably better of with a polygon export.
> If I would zoom into this it would have very jagged edges in the
> render or is there any other way to do it, except importing it to
> rhino as nurbs and rendering there?
If you import it into Rhino as NURBS and render it in Rhino, Rhino also convert it into a polygon mesh in order to render it.
Basically the normal way that NURBS are rendered in most programs are by converting it to a polygon mesh.
So it is more or less the same thing if you export polygons from MoI.
> But then why would I buy MOI if I already have a NURBS modeler?
If Rhino does everything you need and you are completely happy with it, then you don't need MoI. But there are plenty of people that use them in combination for a couple of reasons - one is that MoI has a more modern and streamlined interface so it is easier to learn how to use, and also there are many Rhino users that use MoI for generating a higher quality polygon mesh from NURBS data.
> I cannot
> convert the exported geometry to a sub-D mesh or am I wrong?
That's correct - the exported mesh is generally not going to be appropriate for using for further sub-d smoothing, you use the exported polygons directly as they are, you don't apply further sub-d smoothing to them.
> It seems a bit difficult to work on a 3d obejct with a 300,000 tri
> count and for example texture it.
I think you're getting quite a bit prematurely worried about this...
I'm not really that familiar with XSI, but doesn't it allow you to select a kind of chunk of connected polygons fairly easily? If so then there really isn't a whole lot of difference if the chunk has 10,000 polygons in it or 1,000...
Also you're not going to be generating 300,000 polygon count results from every single model.
For example you were asking about an example with a sphere with a star cut out from it, like this:
Even generating a pretty dense mesh from that will produce something around 3,000 polygons:
This is already dense enough that you can zoom in and not see jagged edges:
Of course if you don't need to zoom in too closely it can be good to use a lighter mesh when possible to have generally smaller sized files. But if your models are not that complex there really isn't that much need to worry about it so much, you can just crank it up.
You only get to 300,000 polygons or beyond on more complex objects, and if your object has a lot of pieces to it, it is just really unusual to want to zoom in extremely closely to every single piece of a complex object...
I'm also working on some improvements to MoI version 2.0 to make it possible to assign materials to surfaces inside of MoI so that you won't have to do it later on to the polygon output, which will help to make things easier for more complex models.
- Michael
