Xirus: free WIP available now!

Dear Xirus users,

The free Rhino-compatible Xirus WIP is now available at https://mirrakoi.com/xirus-for-rhino/ . After signing in on our website you can download Xirus for Rhino 5 (Windows).

Xirus itself, the distribution mechanism, our website and our user-support infrastructure are still in test-mode. For all kinds of feedback, comments, suggestions, and requests, please use the forum on our website https://discourse.mirrakoi.com/ or send us an email to support@mirrakoi.com .

Video documentation and the full list of commands are available at https://mirrakoi.com/xirus-commands/ as well as on our youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm5nw2yfD9Xz8jZOn_QWdpw .

We would appreciate your active feedback in order to improve Xirus, the user-support, and your overall experience related to Xirus.

We thank every user for the effort to test our technology and for helping us to shape the final product.

Best regards,

Mirrakoi Team

2 Likes

I do not want to be rude but I really think that you should say - on the first page - what Xirus actually is. “Xirus for Rhino” says nothing, not even to me as a Rhino user.

I had to click link after link to find out. Why not tell people what you have? And what it is good for? Why should I try it? Doesn’t Rhino make rectangles and Spheres, and so on?

Tell the world what you have. At least one sentence. Somewhere. Visibly.

// Rolf

Hello,

It looks like the product is still in the oven at this point, it’s a list of commands but it’s pretty obvious UX hasn’t been done. I asked a few weeks ago if the UX could be previewed and I don’t think they knew what I was talking about. I get the feeling they may have some semblance of a feature set but cannot extract that into a usable tool set at this point.

RIL
to your point, i followed the link to their site, read the home page and still dont know what the hell this is.
If their page cant simply tell you what it is, they have no chance here

phil

Info landed under FAQ :wink:
https://mirrakoi.com/1191-2

Further information is available at the videos

1 Like

OK, so there it was. Good info.

But why not put in on the frontpage?

I wouild move everything you have on the frontpage to a separate installation page. Before anyone wants to download they want to know why they should download.

The 10 second rule is ruthless. Most people click away from the site within 10 seconds before knowing what you have.

Anyway, I wish you all the best with the product. Looks interesting. Will look more into it later.

// Rolf

1 Like

I also stumbled about something else. Reading this section of the FAQ…

NURBS: Standard CAD that is based on NURBS has several drawbacks which make the modeling process tedious and time-consuming. The consequences of the limitations of NURBS are non-interpolating control points, non-local refinement, non-intuitive and challenging handling of smoothness, junctions or curvature.

Subdivision and polygons: Classical subdivision has the drawback that the control-net does not interpolate the limit surface and uv-mapping or solid modeling is more difficult than with NURBS, whereas polygon meshes do interpolate a surface but do not allow for smooth modeling.

… I got the impression that this is rather a list of arguments one may find in a Math-book describing geometry representation methods – just looking at properties of single surfaces.
This description however has quite little to do with what I would perceive limits of these paradigms in actual software implementations . Somewhat irritating to read – from people who announce nothing less but a revolution…

This statement on Nurbs…

Non-interpolating control points, non-local refinement, non-intuitive and challenging handling of smoothness, junctions or curvature.

…may apply to a single surface.
But one rarely ever works with single surfaces in Nurbs, anywhere. Whether it is Rhino, SolidWorks or Creo, an architectural model or a car rim – one always works with networks of surfaces. Of all popular geometry representation types Nurbs, without a question gives the greatest freedom for precise local refinement: Users may add or remove geometry at every spot of the model. The outcome is a polysurface.

A great actual disadvantage of Nurbs in software implementation is that one may not deform existing networks of surfaces without compromizing already established boundaries. Deforming a neutral face into a laughing face caused kinks and cracks and tons of extra work – it’s the reason why character modelers without exception moved on to Subdivision Surfaces which makes the same task a childs play. Nurbs tools in Maya or 3DSMax are still there, but they haven’t been updated since the Nineties.

A second large problem of Nurbs (not just inside Rhino) is that complex shape transitions generally need a lot of planning and knowledge about the way Surfacing works. It’s hard to try certain shapes real quick – just to get an impression. Beginners may sit for hours and likely still fail to create something like a good looking y-branch.

About Subdivision and Polygons you say…

Classical subdivision has the drawback that the control-net does not interpolate the limit surface and uv-mapping or solid modeling is more difficult than with NURBS, whereas polygon meshes do interpolate a surface but do not allow for smooth modeling.

This odd UV-statement must have been quoted and requoted a thousand times…
Yeah, there’s inherent UV’s in Nurbs while one first needs to assign UV’s to mesh geometry. Again in software implementation there is no drawback at all – quite in contrast. Nurbs automatic per surface UV’s usually have nothing at all to do with the desired material distribution, one often wants to get rid of them.

UV assigment to low poly mesh cages on the other hand is a highly elegant concept – every free SubD Modeler (> software implementation) beats the UV handling of the most expensive Nurbs programs money can buy.

The most critical disadvantage of SubD in software implementation is what you attribute to Nurbs: Local refinement, such as cutting hole while maintaining the shape or connecting separate bodies to one part may be a major issue example here. But every control cage which was built Catmull Clark approximated inside a mesh package does convert to Nurbs exactly as well or as bad as a control cage which previously got represented via limit surface approach.

1 Like

OK.

Downloaded it, beginning to play with it. Going to keep posting comments here as I muddle along.

No toolbar. That’s gotta be fixed, immediately. Hypothetically I could make my own, but I’m not gonna.

Let’s try a primitive sphere. Successfully made a sphere. But…
It’s inside out (I set backfaces of surfaces to be a specific color in Rhino).
Let’s try “Flip”. OK, it’s rightside out.

Let’s mess with it: "XirusSurfacePoints"
OK, points on, let’s move one. Cool it moved. And the now altered sphere also just turned itself inside out again. OK, I’ll live with that for now.

Let’s try something Clayoo can’t do. Relocate gumball… IT WORKS! I can relocate the gumball, snap it to any geometry I want. Nice.

With the gumball relocated, I select several points and scale them. Works as I hoped. Good.

OK, lets turn the Xirus Surface Points off. Um. No command for that. How do I do it? I search all the Xirus Commands. Nothing. I eventually accidentally hit my points off hot key. Points turn off. Hm. Hit my points on hot key. Points turn on. Didn’t need to call “XirusSurfacePoints” in the first place, apparently.

Turn points back off, select the blob to move it. And it doesn’t highlight. It does show it’s isocurves though, and it does move.

That’s enough for now. UX is not making me happy. Or maybe I should say the lack of anything resembling UX is making me unhappy.

Moveable gumball and the ability to turn points on and off normally rather than picking “vertex mode” like in Clayoo are both plusses though.

More later.

1 Like

Update:

the moveable gumball only works on the surface points. If you use the functions that allow you to select edges or faces, the gumball is fixed, can’t be relocated, and isn’t normalled to the object like it is in Clayoo. It also doesn’t have Clayoo’s additional orange arrow, which is normalled to the surface or edge you select.

You can work around this by just selecting the relevant vertices instead of the edge or surface, but you shouldn’t have to do that.

Thank you for your feedback, it’s much appreciated.

In a few days we’ll deliver an update of the WIP with a toolbar, a custom Flip command as well as NURBS-to-Xirus conversion among other features and fixes.

Pablo

2 Likes

Great! Looking forward to it.