Help converting a mesh to nurbs

This is great…thanks very much!

That’s good to know for comparison. I have not downloaded ZB 4R7 or the documentation yet. I think Dynamesh could be really useful for some of the work I am doing. I would like to see how Dynamesh is working with subtools also. I thought that all the subtools had to fit into into the overall Dynamesh resolution, so it was not possible to have one subtool with a higher resolution than another, but maybe I’m wrong there.

I’m not sure about subtool resolution. I’m a ZBrush newbie and know about enough to be dangerous, at this point. I’m trying to learn it, though.

This a fantastic example. Thank you for sharing it!

Of course, my immediate second thought is that it would be WONDERFUL if Rhino 6 could do this type of intelligent mesh-smoothing in version 6 … without having to monkey around :monkey: with Z-Brush at all. Any McNeel thoughts on the matter?

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I’ve been trying to learn it for a long time, and I’ll admit I’ve been a ZBrush newbie for about 14 years. :smile:

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Well, that remeshing is not just some remeshing. There’s only less than a handful of programs which do offer intelligent quad remeshing at all… the killer feature for those who want to make highly detailed sculpted models available in Games. In each of these apps it took years to get there even as a high priority feature and what Zbrush offers in this respect simply plays in another league when compared to other implemetations. I guess it save to say that seing this sort of remeshing from arbitry meshes as seen here is rather unlikly for V6. That doesn’t mean that one couldn’t profit in numerous other ways from mesh smoothing.

I tried this sort of thing with 3DCoat and it sort of worked with that software, too. For whatever reason, I just couldn’t get the hang of 3DCoat, it just has a very odd interface. Not that I know much of ZBrush at this point, but I can at least get around a bit and it makes sense. 3DCoat is just plain weird to me and I struggled to do anything in that software. I don’t think it does nearly as good of a job creating quad meshes, at least in my limited experience.

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Max Smirnov, on the MoI forums wrote a couple scripts for MoI. One to import polygon objects and one to convert them to nurbs. Here’s the link if you want to check it out:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6674.162

MoI reads and writes Rhino 5 files.

Hi I’ve followed your steps but I’m having a bit of trouble going from t-spline surface to nurbs. Attached above is the t-spline surface after the tsConvert and tsSmoothToggle command. After that, I’m unable to convert it into a mesh using the MeshtoNURB command. It did not allow me to select the t-spline mesh object. Any idea what I’m missing?

Ivan

You want to use the Convert to Rhino Object, to get a NURBS object from a TS surface.

OH yes of course! I actually did that yesterday and didn’t realize that it outputs a NURB surface. No wonder why it didn’t allow me to convert it :sweat:

Thanks mcramblet

I see if the original mesh has distortions, then NURBS takes over them :confused:
2018-08-05_092210

MeshToNURB converts each individual mesh face to an individual NURBS surface. It does not create a single NURBS surface from multiple mesh faces. The shape will remain the same.

Previous posts in this thread discuss methods of obtaining NURBS surfaces from multiple mesh vertices/faces.

I would try ShowZBuffer > ViewCaptureToFile > Heightfield > Rebuild.

Here https://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/meshtonurb

For converting mesh to nurb, it is a process we called Reverse engineering. For organic shape,there are 3 softwares you can use.
1.Rhino with Tspline 2. Fusion 360 3. Geomagic studio (Using Tspline and Fusion 360 are almost the same)
My workflow is using zbrush to fixing the scanning data and using zremesher to control the number of polygon and topology.
Then export the obj. file to rhino. Convert it to tspline object, toggle smooth mode, convert tspline to rhino object. ( just like this tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnU17armaXE)
But this method has several limitations , it may not accurate and may have slightly different between mesh and nurb . Second, it seems like there are limitation of the number of polygon . This method only worked while the polygon number below 100,000 as my experience.
Using Geomagic studio is the best method as i know and widely be used in the industry. U can easily check the deviation between mesh and nurb surface and no limitation of the number of polys. The most important thing is u can adjust the surface patch or export to other CAD software (Solidworks , UG NX…)
(Reference video of geomagic : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B5PHKtTBEY)
But if your model is simply , i recommend that using rhino with Tspline (fast and simple)

What’s this? How did a beautiful surface easily turn out from the set of curves from the mesh? And without any minor changes, adjustments … In Rhino is there?

If you scan and reverse functional or extremly organic parts this is a perfect solution. However patchlayout isn‘t good and it doesn‘t make sense to model in polys first and then just converting to Nurbs. A trained modeller can model this in better quality under 15 mins. I see 5 base surfaces, fillets and two corner blends.
And no, Rhino can‘t do this. Geomagic is leader.

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Geomagic Design X 2016 converts mesh to NURBS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qymk1BQVIb4

Geomagic Design X 2016 has exact surfacing tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7kSwo6ztIc

Hey, we released a new interesting reverse engineering feature today for Rhino 7 WIP you might be interested in. A way to reverse engineer from a mesh:

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