First of all, pardon for my bad english. I have been a rhino user for 7 years. Before I was introduced to rhino, I used 3dsmax for most of my project (architectural design) .
Since rhino5, the way the software handle meshes and NURBS Really amazed me and now i rarely use 3dsmax and always rely on rhino for most of my modelling. Grasshopper in rhino simply done all the hard parametric object and I never had any problem trying to model any types of geometry.
However there is one interesting workflow that I found in the software like MUDBOX and ZBRUSH quite appealing as a person who mostly do design.
i wonder if there is a technique in rhino to edit control points by brushing your mouse pointer over. ??? (It can either push or pull the points based on its object Z). And with the extend of wacom, u can control the strength of the pulling just by adding mor pressure on the stylus.
Rhino is a very perfect software for me, and if this feature has or will be implemented inV6? it will help designer to “sketch out” the form with much more freedom.
Or perhaps someone did a plug in for this? Anybody knows?
The main limiting factor is probably the patch nature of Nurbs polysurfaces.These patches don’t even behave uniformly, have different density and UV-orientations. When freely deforming geometry with trims one either needs to make it increasingly complex with every deformation or let geometry tear appart, so that gaps appear. Even if one got that problem solved one still had two layers of geometry one needed to change in realtime, Nurbs and their respective render-mesh.
The programs you mentioned work on single shells of meshes which behave uniformly and are topologically optimized towards etiting in multiple resolutions. These apps essentially were developed as one found the Nurbs paradigm too restrictive for free sculptural work, say for creating faces of digital characters.
Thanks for the reply hifred,
so,there is no way for NURBS polysurfaces to behave like meshes in the way we could edit them? ( like ZBRUSH method, but using NURBS instead of meshes)
Although zbrush and mudbox is better suited for character modelling, With the advance of modern construction, as an architect, we feel that “stroking the wacom stylus to sculpt an object” is the new era to bridge manual handdrawing into 3d computer drawing.
I think rhino would be such a killer software if the developer can do a control point editing with such method. To be a little bit more sympathetic towards wacom user.
I dont know if anyone interested in this kind of workflow, since Rhino is a very powerful software it can handle both NURBS and mesh (with TSPLINE) so maybe we need more topic on this, so maybe it can be implemented in V6 ;p
Using this kind of sculpting over just a single surface would sure work, Rhino’s hightfield command works similar in principle but uses the canned greyscale values of an image for displacement. In order to hold all the detail of a typical Zbrush mesh one needed to refine the Nurbs surface resolution to an extend that executing typical surfacing operations like creating a fillet or blend got very error prone: These tools prefer simpler input. So one could either brush or use surfacing operations and that is only thinking of just a single surface.
One would not win anything by using Nurbs geometry here, subdivision surfaces meshes in contrast offer a very elegant and mature way to deal with interactive deformation.
I believe, as hifred points out, that the biggest obstacle to this is the fact that model objects usually end up pieced together from multiple nurbs surfaces. Within Rhino today, it’s usually a tedious process to try to get them all stitched together into one large nurbs if it can be done at all.
This would be a great area for development by the Rhino folks.
One tool that could provide some utility for you in some cases might be the cage edit tools. Have you looked into these?
Hi AIW, i know about cage editing tool, but basically it is to deform a global shape of the object.(abit like advanced version of FFD box in 3dsmax)
I just read MAYA command list and they have a feature to sculpt NURBS object the same way to sculpt Meshes in Zbrush.I wonder if rhino can do the same thing because afterall the goal for all 3d software is to create an object with diverse possbile method.
What i want to say is that because some artist prefer to use wacom (like me) rather than mouse, the advantage of having wacom is that u can control the stroke pressure and translate it as a complex input to the computer.
So far rhino user relies on mouse… imagine the benefit it can get from wacom stylus, Rhino would overkill all autodesk product and attract more digital sculptor artist. So for rhino dev.team out there, please consider about this, please please ;p
I’ve been looking at sub-surface software and a brush tool to move points would be a fantastic addition. Hieghtfields surfaces and meshes can be smoothed. In another thread there is a question about removing intersecting faces due to offset mesh. A brush tool could smooth out these intersections for better shelling and internal wall construction.
Ive checked some other threads that also demand a subdiv modelling method. All I can think about is this =
rhino uses mesh-base system to generate the surface, openGL displays boxmode or smoothmode just like Tspline does. This has proven no problem in rhino algoritm, since Tspline can use a hybrid between mesh and NURBS. However output parameter still define the surface as mesh.
2.The mesh then can be divided into millions of polygon ( shortcut like page up and page down go to higher or lower subdiv) and we can work on lower or higher subdiv level during the modelling process. And the ouput parameter is still meshes.
3.ability to brush the surface vertex polygon with drawing pad like WACOM or Mouse. The profile of the brush can be made using NURBS curve profile as the brush main input (by doing so, we can create a profile brush on the fly, perhaps a dedicated webpage for user to upload their brush input profile, or download it viceversa.) or the brush can be a reference from another geometry. (Zbrush or mudbox user will understand this)
Retopology button to even out the amount of mesh on the surface, (like rebuild mesh command)
a single-click Mesh mode to NURBS mode conversion, since the surface that is generated are mainly quads, even distribution number, I believe the conversion will be easier than TSPLINE. ( there will be a pop up panel that show minimum control points generated to the surface )
The NURBS that is made from this method to have different parameter (on the properties it can be like “UV-based polysurface”, bcz it needs to save the mesh UV so that it can be converted back to Mesh without chAnging its polygon position.
7.tweaking control points in “NURBS mode” will update the UV in mesh mode (this wouldnt be shown on the screen of course)
8.trimming NURBS mode will pop up a warning sign “UV-based polysurface will be converted to NURBS polysurface” so then, it is not advised to trim in NURBS mode
9.the good thing of having to work in multi subdiv level is to be able to “bake” the geometry into displacement map from higher level subdiv model to be used as vector displacement material for rendering.
This is not just limited to model much more complex shape, modelling tree barks, rough landscape and other complicated detail will just be like drawing on a piece of paper. 100% by the stroke of the hand.
I am sure rhino algoritm is capable of doing all that stuff. If this stuff wiill be on V6. i will replace my bible with rhino installation box.
I agree with Runnie.
These are excellent ideas.
Zbrush and Blender are too complex for me to use, since all that I do must be able to go to fabrication and molding. So to do this in Rhino will be excellent.
Also, this will make Rhino a better competitor in the scanning/3D-printing/CNC world.