This artificial separation of a mesh vs. a faceted mode SUBd is really annoying. In any other program a mesh is a mesh is a mesh. And if I join them, they join. And if I smooth them, they smooth. Not in Rhino.
So even to make simple changes to imported models it takes me an excruciating amount of work because some tools exist in mesh mode, some only in SubD. Some in neither, so I have to do them in lightweight Nurbs patches and extract the control polygons of those newly created surfaces, and then I cannot join them to my SubD model.
I know what you’re getting at but the box mode for a SubD in Rhino is not a mesh, it’s just a shaded display of the control polygon. In your example, you need to use ToSubD on the top mesh and then run Join on that and the lower SubD.
Again, I know what you want and I as well lobbied for the same internally early on. Any mesh command seems like it should just work on a SubD displayed in box mode, but it’s not really a mesh so they can’t all just work is my understanding. The mesh commands instead need to be given SubD support which is what we’ve been doing for many of them in the WIP.
Brian, I completely understand the non-sense of the flaw logic behind this. At the risk of being call dramatic this makes working in SubD + Meshes + Curves + Nurbs a completely broken promise.
I’m telling you and your team that this is absolutely silly and extremely counter-productive, and I’m not OK with a response of: “I lobbied for this but the people who do not work designing and modeling for a living don’t think it’s a good idea”. So I’m going to continue to bitch about this one until someone can have some common sense here.
Let me just clarify that for the time being I don’t even expect SubD in Rhino to be good for design and modeling, I know that will take a lot of work. And I’m fine being patient with that.
For now I just want to Rhino to be useful to at least to do some basic edits and visualization of models created in a professional SubD tool. Right now between this silly “this mesh is not a mesh” stuff, not being able to smooth only what I want (do you know what happens when you press tab to an entire production car model?!), having a gumball re-setting itself after each move, not being able to copy-paste, _AlignVertices not working in SubD, …etc, etc, etc, it’s really hard to work efficiently.
Please help your team realize that they are getting in our way, constantly, with the impact that their vacuum-formed decisions have in our work.
That’s what happens when engine and combustion engineers are responsible for the design of the dashboard of the car. No matter how professional they are, and I think they are, the result is not going to be optimal.
