The answers to those questions will different based on what kind of problems you are trying to solve. What are you delivering as output. To who. What level of design iteration your process/product/client/industry requires.
I’ve find Nurbs modeling a very limiting method to do quick iterations and form exploration for any kind of design work. You will always run out fo patience, fun, budget, and time before you run out of ideas.
On the other hard Sub-D are extremely tedious and messy to do detailed work. Adding simple things like a hole or a split in SubD is like trying to cut a soft clay model with a band saw. It can be done, and if you have a ton of skill and time you can make it look ok, but it will never be good, let alone editable.
Here’s an example from the gardening center I visited today, SubD vs Nurbs holes:
We used to do OBJ, but lately a super buggy in the Rhino side. We are having more success with FBX. I’ve tried Copy-Ex plungin but it was too complicated to install and I could not get it to work, maybe is better now? If so, I will take a look again.
Otherwise I was thinking writing our own temp-file routine to bring back-forth meshes into the active mesh item (Modo) / layer (Rhino). It would be great having proper Rhino-Modo interoperability support, but Rhino is not even watching enough their own work in OBJ exports, even Step files are broken very frequently. It would be unrealistic for me to expect them to develop, maintain and support yet another file format I/O.
Also Foundry has become a really weird company, and they are developing very little these days, I feel like Modo is in life-support, and probably not meeting the ambitious goals of Foundry’s always changing private equity owners. I wish we had a healthier alternative to Modo, but nothing good enough has come up as a viable alternative, yet. This is why I wish Rhino could be an excellent SubD modeler, but like I said earlier, don’t see this happening soon either.
I also feel bad because, like you, I keep asking for tools/options that are all part of a weird/geeky way to select and then slap around vertices, edges, polygons to make a form. I’m fully aware that Tsplines and Modo have high highly unsuccessful (commercially) in their attempt to becoming mainstream design tools. I’m also fully aware that this is not a smart way to work. So I also want to see what McNeel’s team can do with more drivable tools, like curve-based workflows. A super simple example of this: Loft w/history.
Proper curve-networks-based workflows (why to stop at the simplicity of lofts?!), with live Boolean (GH history) and simulation/collision tools like Kangaroo (make the SubDs between curves puffier, more/less concave/convex) and smoothing tools would go a long way. But this will be a ton of work. It will take many years. That’s why in the meantime I want a lot more ‘dumb tools’ like Modo has.
In summary: We want it all. We are terrible customers.
G
