As @theoutside puts it “You CAN sculpt with Nurbs, you CAN be precise with Subd, and you CAN do all sorts of things with mesh beyond sculpting”… but while I build my toolbox in each of these categories, I’m trying to better build the muscle memory on immediately seeing an object and creating a mental model of how I might approach it.
Any "here’s how I’d do it"s would be hugely helpful!
SubD can only accurately model an existing design if the surfaces have zero curvature normal to any creases or naked edges. That’s a fundamental limit of SubD.
My experience is precise control of dimensions and shapes is simpler with NURBS than SubD, once the NURBS topology is determined.
Agree with CADARTZ to start with NURBS - you’ll learn the most solid foundation that way, if only for the reason that it is the most “native” language of Rhino, (kind of like how learning Latin tells you lots about the deep-structures of all the Romance language). And by extension - using it will produce familiarity with Rhino’s UI conventions and toolsets that are core to the applications structure. It’s also the deepest / most developed tool chain. Also BTW, if you’re setting out to learn surfacing, try not to get too distracted by the higher level tools (i.e. all the boolean functions which are basically macros of the standard operations). Read the Level 1 & 2 training docs and watch surfacing tutorials on YT.
personally, I do this with a "best tool for the job approach. "
see below.
Fully admit this may change if I were to actually get into this, but if someone dropped this on my desk and needed it in 2 hrs, this is how I’d get after it.
subd for the main body, with the lower circle matched to a nurbs cylinder with subdmatch- convert this to nurbs when you hare happy with the shape.
nurbs for the lower reciprocating detail
nurbs “cutter” to make the side detail, boolean subtract to create the shape.
I’d do a iterative step here with intersect with history in order to see and tune the shape of the actual intersection.
see this video for how to do this-
Once that was done, I’d pipe trim a gap at the intersection edge and then draw a profile curve, match it to the surface edges to g1 and then do a sweep 2.
see this video on pipe trim
the rest of the model is standard nurbs modeling and details.
