Seriously, how does anyone learn surface modeling at a professional level?

Kyle you don’t look a day over 75!

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I don’t feel a day over 100!

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“All wrong” depends on the context and what is required. Not every use of Rhino is to produce a surface which satisfies the “automotive class A” rules.

Of course. This is why the next sentence I wrote was: “Its shortcomings get most obvious as soon as there is a requirement for good surface continuity and ability to conveniently edit the model.” :slight_smile: Clean surface modeling is the way to go, no matter the industry and whether it’s a job or a hobby.

Not to mention that the importance of clean modeling multiplies with big projects consisting hundreds or even thousands of models. File size could easily get 100 times bigger (i.e. several Gigabytes) while using improperly made surfaces.

Since most products are produced in asia under extraordinary varied conditions ( I said most, not all) …the only products that truly need to be class A are cars IMO.

Building class A on consumer products is a monumental waste of time in my experience due to the way consumer products are manufactured. Go to a factory anywhere in asia…you’ll quickly see what happens to your model that you so painstakingly sweated each cv on… (it ain’t pretty)

In most (not all) consumer product models, speed is greater than Quality if we are using class A as a measure of quality. This comes from 28 years of pro modeling and 5k+ models built for concept and production in the toy and consumer products industry…

that is my take, I’m sure there are others…

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I was refining the surface of the bow of a rowing boat, interacting with the customer. The surface was smooth and fair, we just wanted to refine the shape. The boat is built by bending wood strips over a set of station “molds” and fastening the ends of the strips to bent wood stems which are beveled by hand. Once I was moving control points less than 0.005 inch I asked the customer how much wood he removed in one pass of coarse sanding of the strips. And I didn’t mention that the strips might not have the courtesy to bend exactly as shown in the math model. We decided the surface refinement was complete.

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About 10 years ago I learned that China has 25 different ratings for quality. As some people say: You get what you pay for. Depending on the price and material requirements, many factories from many countries (including those in EU and USA) could offer you products either with top quality, a reasonable quality, or utterly bad quality.

Consumer electronics that feature shiny plastic (or CNC-milled) body need to fall under the Class-A requirement, otherwise the reflections would immediately expose any lack of good continuity or uneven areas. Even simple shapes for NURBS modeling such like hairdryers often have G2 continuity between the body and the handle, because most of them are shiny. Many power tools also have G2 continuity, despite having a matte finish.
Most of the sports glasses, and the major part of the body of phones, tablets, laptops are also G2.

The body of the Xbox One controller is G2 and that gives it a more premium look. However, the PlayStation 4 controller (Dual shock 4) has G1 everywhere and that alone makes it look of very low quality.

I believe a sign of excellence is also to choose the right tool for the right job, with the right amount of effort.

Furthermore you can quite separate a professional out of non-professionals by its attitude regarding time.

I don‘t understand why everyone likes to be the Lucky Luke of CAD. Its actually quite simple, the more time you invest, the better it usually gets.

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The number one rule in NURBS modeling is that learning of new techniques continues through the entire life of the modeler and involves lots of experimenting. As you mentioned already, one could choose among several tools for the same task, and which one of them is the best solution depends on the result it brings. Due to these variables, I don’t think that a few tutorials could fully teach somebody to model with NURBS. It’s most important to carefully examine the purpose of each individual tool, and establish reliable techniques that appliy to most scenarios (such like: having a good idea of building proper surface patch layout; keeping the surfaces simple and single-span when possible; knowing the importance of using the analysis tools, etc).

FWIW- Sky Greenawalt has put together an advanced series of tutorials that you should all watch. If you don’t know Sky, he’s one of the best in the biz, a super nice guy (and good friend of mine) and has the 2nd coolest dog I’ve ever met.

Watch these, and be sure to say thank you to Sky for sharing his limitless knowledge with our community.

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Everything you say is correct, however, g2 continuity is not the sole definition for class A. It’s merely one component… there is acceleration into and out of the continuity, single span surfaces, point distribution, cv rows and how they line up and relate from surface to surface, and on and on and on…that’s why there is so much confusion around the term.

Which is why I’ll reiterate my opinion that Class A for non cars or anything smaller than a car (unless it’s chromed) is usually wasted time and effort…

go ahead and match G2, blend G2, and build to g2…you’ll have gorgeous highlights, but…understand that alone does not make it “class A”. In fact most auto companies have their own individual standards for what Class A is, and they vary wildly from company to company. So a class A modeler from say Ford, will not be working to identical standards to what say Audi is doing. Now in that case, I’m talking about many fractional differences here, but my point is, there is no “text book”, concrete, industry wide standard for class A.

Yes the xbox controller has g2 blends and looks quite nice…BUT, I’d bet a box of donuts it wouldn’t pass Audi’s standard for class A. AND I’d bet the coffee to go with the donuts that the mold was highly polished by hand.

In automotive tooling the goal is zero touch, zero hand finishing machine to part. That just does not exist in consumer products unless a company owns and controls its own manufacturing.

Anything that goes to an asian factory gets significantly hand tooled. Which brings me back to the point of, why waste the time modeling microscopic continuities if the mold is going to be hand polished?

Now I’m not saying be sloppy… I’m saying Class A for consumer products is usually wasted time and effort.

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Thanks for the rad promo buddy!

One thing I’d like to add - you’ll notice that I named the series “Primary Surfacing” not “Class-A Surfacing!” I feel like there’s a bit of a false dichotomy in discussions like this sometimes - like on one side we have a sorta “bang it out, who care how it looks, it’s conceptual” approach and then on the other where we imagine we slave over every single aspect of our models with a microscope, for fear that a German automotive technical surfacing wizard will emerge from our screens and scold us. What I’m actually proposing is much more of a middle way. Now, Kyle is, to be sure, freakishly fast. If we had to do some sort of head to head timed modeling match, I’m likely going to put my money on Kyle. But, that being said, what I think people will find is:

  1. Making clean primary surfaces really takes no more time than making bad ones.
  2. Clean primary surfaces are much more quickly edited - often directly in many cases, without having to revert back to your input curves. This saves you time!
  3. Everyone, and I mean everyone can benefit from a better understanding of patch layout. Especially when it comes to filling 3 and 5 sided holes. This is a HUGE part of why I’m making this series.
  4. Not every model needs to be super polished, but I’m pretty sure ALL of us want to have the skills to make a truly flawless model when the circumstances call for it. The easiest and best way to achieve this is by thinking more like a Class-A surface modeler - understanding patch layout, surface degree and matching. These are the three pillars upon which any high quality model is made.

-Sky

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I already mentioned the several requirements that define Class-A, so I don’t know why you got the impression that I was commenting only on G2. You can clearly see this in my previous posts in this thread, as well as many of my posts in other threads. Also, I often write that G2 is not necessarily better than G1 or G1,5 in certain cases. This is why I often use “Match surface” with G1 and then improve the flow of the surface by manually adjusting the 3rd row of control points with the “Move UVN” tool and using Zebra analysis, Curvature analysis and Curvature graph. For this to be possible, I mentioned that it’s a must to have a simplified surface to begin with. It must be combined with a good understanding for surface patch layout placement. Achieving G2 is just the last part of the modeling.

As for the importance of G2 versus G1 in consumer products, take the PS4’s dual shock 4 for example. The PS4 already sold more than 110 000 000 units, which means that “Sony” has sold at least 150 000 000 Dual shock 4 controllers (many PS4’s included two controllers; and many people bought an extra controller afterwards). The body of Dual shock 4 gives a visual perception for lower quality due to the distinctive G1 surface that connect the handles and the body. Not only that, those G1 surfaces also feel uncomfortable and compromise the ergonomics, because their radius is considerably larger than the radius of the middle fingers that are naturally placed there when you hold the game controller. Many people complained about that since years. I already described the problem in another thread a few weeks ago. That visual and ergonomics issue could have been eliminated with just several hours extra modeling work done by the person(s) who did the 3d model of the controller. And that extra work would forever make the Dual shock 4 both, more comfortable to hold and more beautiful.
The Xbox One controller, on the other hand, is designed with G2 and don’t have such issues with ergonomics and cheap looking G1 transitions. I won’t argue whether its G2 meets the requirements of AUDI or not. But its smooth G2 blends with smaller relative radiuses clearly have an advantage over the G1 rounded surfaces with considerably larger radiuses found in the Dual shock 4 controller.

Many industrial designers underestimate the importance of the properly executed design (the combination of a great artistic vision and proper surface modeling that closely follows the design intent while taking the ergonomics and visual perception into account). Take the new Huawei P40 Pro, for example. Many people, including owner of its predecessor P30 who wanted to upgrade, and phone reviewers don’t like the fact that the design of P40 Pro features a distinctive yet extremely disturbing shape of the rounded edges of the OLED screen that don’t follow the rest of the body naturally. At certain angles the rounded corners look plain cheap and ugly. The reason for that is that the radius of the screen is much larger than the radius of the rounded corner of the body. That makes the phone visually unpleasing to many people, hence their negative reactions. And they are not even professional designers, just basic consumers that don’t like the aforementioned weird design decision.

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“Class A” appears to be applied both to the methods and the results. For the final product it should be obvious which is important. For an employee it is less obvious.

There is a bit of faulty logic, common in the auto industry, which says something has bee done a certain way for a long time and the results are generally good. The faulty conclusion is therefore that way is the only way to do that something to achieve good results. Even worse is when the assumption is made that using the certain way will always produce good results.

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This is totally true. About 10 years ago me and my buddy in a company had a small competition while designing a car door. I was using Rhino 4, he used Alias. I achieved better looking transitions with the “Move UVN” tool and Zebra analysis, because he made the mistake to rely on the numerical edge analysis in Alias that showed when two adjacent surfaces meet at mathematically perfect G2 transition. My surfaces were not mathematically true G2. Instead, they were something like G1,9 :smiley: but what’s important is that they had considerably smoother flow. His perfect G2 transitions didn’t help, because the surfaces were wavy in many areas due to wrong acceleration ratios of the control point distribution. He simply ignored the importance of using Zebra or static light lines.

Similar mistake could be seen in this Alias model that may have correct G2 transitions, but the surface flow itself is all wrong. You can notice the biggest errors at the rear portion of the front fender where it meets the door, and the upper portion of the rear fender next to the side glass. Many Rhino users could achieve better surface flow at the rear fender, even if using a single, multi-span surface to replace the 4 separate surfaces in that Alias model. Multi-span surfaces are “not allowed” in many automotive companies, but they have their advantages, too.

The most useful tutorials I’ve done were by @jean77flip on Pluralsight.

There’s one where you build a robot that’s relatively basic technique but has a focus on making you faster, eliminating use of the command line.

There’s another with a motorcycle that ups the surfacing focus more.

It’s a paid site, but a one month membership is worth it just for those tutorials. The rest of their offerings aren’t as good.

Tons of tutorials on youtube, too. “advanced surfacing rhino” is a good search to try.

i am so glad i can help in a small way.

if there is anything else i can do to help you guys improve - kindly let me know.

An easy way to learn the importance of keeping the surface simple (minimum control points as possible) is the following scene. If you try “Match surface” with G2 on that same surface, it will heavily distort the general flow of the surface. However, if you activate the Zebra analysis and adjust the 3rd row of control points with the “N” slider of the “Move UVN” tool to achieve something close to G2 continuity, that will let you preserve the flow of the surface.

Match surface G2 - Preserve flow 2.3dm (2.5 MB)

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In another thread @TomTom posted a link to the 10 golden rules of surface modeling with Alias. Many of them apply to Rhino, as well.

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Watched the into; and judging solely from it…outstanding!

Already thinking of learner cohorts to share this with. (Me, I already know everything… :wink:). Gut says this is — must see RhinoTV

Thanks for the effort @sgreenawalt

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