T-Splines, is it still alive?

Have you logged in to your Autodesk account online lately? I went there and found my registration for T-Splines, contacted them and asked that it be “whatevered” to make it work again. Autodesk told me the license was “retired” (or words to that effect) but my software should still work; Now it works, but every time I start Rhino 5 it fails out with a “could not start plug-in” message, “do you want to report this error to McNeel” to which I reply “no” then start Rhino 5 again and everything works. I also likely have Windows installation errors so your experience may differ, but contacting Autodesk worked for me…

Top firm’s criticizing Autodesk.

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I did report it but have had no response. I’m playing around with the V7 WIP so will return to T-Splines at some point. I am loading the plug in ok but get license errors as soon as I try to use it.

I’m happy to report that all is well with all my Autodesk plug-ins for Rhino. I just completed a fresh installation of Windows 10 and Rhino 5, Rhino 5 64-bit, Rhino 6, and Rhino 7 WIP. I installed Autodesk T-Splines for Rhino, version 3.4 for Rhino 5 (latest updated release) and version 4.0 for Rhino 5 64-bit (latest updated release). I encountered no problems at all. Activation via internet went just fine, etc. I did have an activation problem with the RealTime Renderer component of Autodesk Shape Analysis but Autodesk support was prompt in responding to my complaint and supplied me with an activation code in a timely manner.

Now, if they’d just update these plug-ins to run in Rhino 6 and Rhino 7…

technically i am not sure if its correct to call t-splines for rhino an autodesk product since all they did was taking it away from the rhino users, they did not develop a thing for it after they put there greasy hands on it :wink:

also who the f*** needs t-splines now that you have sub d for rhino? i cant understand why this is popping up like its the end of the world and nobody out there to help :smiley: well whatever nevermind.

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I think after all it is save to say that the probability of this to happen is exactly 0%.

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We have been working hard on Rhino 7 SubD. There are a lot of models now possible. And lately we have updated the ToNurbs with surface packing to reduce the number of final patches in the Brep:

We hope that will help your workflow.

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I can’t speak for everyone, but the current functionality of SubD in the Rhino 7 WIP has fully replaced everything I ever used in T-Splines. The latest ToNurbs output was the last thing I was waiting for.

Thanks for all the hard work on SubD guys!

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Interesting read. I am glad about some heavy players calling on Autodesk.

The letter seems to line up with the points I made in this post sometime ago:

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I’ve been developing workflows based around the the new WIP 7 Sub-D tools for automotive applications, and the NcNeel team is dong a great job implementing this new object type. I really think this is going to have a big impact on automotive surface modeling and will be a big shift away from a strictly “frame & fillet” style of workflow.

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We’d love to see the work you are doing with SubD for automotive projects!

Sure thing. Most of my recent work is confidential but I have a few items I put together on my own time for proof of concept. Here is a quick speed form that I did not to long ago.

I’ve been mostly testing out conversion from Sub-D to NURBS for a variety of reasons. Many of my OEM clients REALLY want to use grasshopper for creating intricate surface patterns and textures. One of the main stumbling blocks to this is that they often want to tessellate patterns across complex poly-surfaces. This can really be a pain as you can’t evaluate the sub-surfaces as a whole without creating some kind of “proxy surface” and then pulling your pattern work down to the design surface. These Sub-D tools are tremendously powerful for creating whole curvature continuous UNTRIMMED surface sheets when converted to NURBS and then combined using ‘_Mergesrf’. The Image below are al various conversions from the original Sub-D speed form to NURBS surfaces with different setting and backing sub-d > NURBS directly from Grasshopper by running a Sub-D node to a Brep node.

I’ve also been using this workflow to build consistent panel gaps and feature lines such as the ones in the image below.

The texture and pattern results are working out great so far. This is just a quick and dirty

proof of concept for building the workflow, but you get the idea.

Another thing that I like are all the options that you have available for building Sub-D objects. This Sub-D example was originally built in a few minutes starting with a Sub-D primitive plane, but all the typical surface building from curves techniques work great too. You can even build them by extracting control polygons from surfaces as well…really helpful if you’re reverse engineering someone’s poly-surface to convert to Sub-D object.

Sometimes get anomalies in the render mesh or surface edge continuity after re-joining my surfaces after merging some edges (image below) but this can usually be resolved by refitting to tolerance and believe it our not, converting from sud-d to NURBS in grasshopper and baking. (see second image).

Over all going from Sub-D to NURMS appears to be lossless.

This second project was also heavily reliant on Sub-d objects as well for smoothing this bone structure.



I’ll post more work that’s not confidential in the future if you’re interested.

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That bone structure is a looker! Nice!!!

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please do!! awesome stuff!!

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Surface packing is a great feature and has worked wonderfully for me so far. Sometimes I still leave this function off if I need to manage the sub surfaces I choose to merge on my own. I can’t get over how awesome the development of these sub-d tools has been. You guys have been doing awesome work…game changing!

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I think it’s save to say that he and a lot of other users (me included) are very interested.

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Just wait until you find out how the nodelocked Xnurbs license works… (10 lifetime activations, then it’s dead in the water…)

We are all interested. Superb work.

If you are want to post any projects in the gallery that would be great too: https://discourse.mcneel.com/c/gallery/automotive/136

The gallery posts have threads too.

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SubD for Rhino 7WIP has become a very valuable tool already. The only thing I still miss in comparison with T-Splines is the ability to reengineer/resurface on top of imported meshes. (Or did I miss something? If so I would very much appreciate any hint as to how this can be acchieved)
Otherwise Rhino SubD fully meets any exspectations one could have. Thanks very much and Respect so far!

An example here would be great. But try Quadremesh > Subd Interpolate

https://discourse.mcneel.com/c/serengeti/quad-remesh/109