Thanks to Kyle for kicking this thread off! I have LOTS of thoughts on all this - had a brief convo with Kyle where he posed the question to me “If you could only use 3 tools from VSR, what would they be?” I think this is a super smart way of approaching this. I don’t know if I can go all the way down to 3 (maybe more like 5?) but with that in mind - the first thing that comes to mind is the Control Point Modeling tool in VSR.
If you, like me, think that point editing is the beating heart of NURBS modeling, this tool is unbelievably great. This rather unassuming pop up packs SO MUCH functionality into such a small space, it’s unreal. This combines ChangeDegree, MoveUVN (with proper Blend Laws/Falloffs!), ExtendSrf, ExtendSurfaceEdge, and Smooth into one simple and elegant pop up. There’s also the ability to Undo and Redo by manually clicking the top right arrows. I talk a lot about Sculpt and Match as a workflow - this is pretty much all the tools you want for manually sculpting a NURBS surface. It has properly implemented fall offs. All the selections can be hot keyed - so you you want to select a row, you just type “r” when the tool is active etc. This tool works equally well on curves AND surfaces. The amount of time that this tool saves by allowing the user to do all sculpting in one single command is unreal. It’s just very pleasant to work with - the UI is frankly better than what’s in stock Rhino - you can get into a really good flow while using this tool, instead of having to hop to lots of different commands.
That being said, there’s still room for improvement! There is no “Face” option in the Mode - It should be Single/Row/Face/All/Extrapolate on the right. Also - if there was the ability to integrate SetPt like functionality that would be even better. It’s a bit too dogmatic with regards to Class A - you can bump up and down the degree, but not the spans. Would be ideal to have the same up/down clickers for spans as there are for degree.
I should also mention - this toolset would be phenomenal for sculpting Subd’s in Rhino as well - so if McNeel were to mimic this type of tool, you’d get something that could be used on both classic patch modeling AND Subd meshes as well.
I’ll post more later, too many irons in the fire, but would be thrilled if McNeel were to implement VSR like tools!
-Sky
ETA - here’s a vid I whipped up showing the tool in action
