Z's - Modo to Fusion to Rhino

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Seeing’s how I’m on a roll posting here, this is a recent project which went across a number of different apps.

I modeled the Beveled Z in Modo using it’s great SubD toolset and then needed to work in Rhino on the model as a nurbs object. I exported as Obj out of Modo and brought it into Fusion 360 (a great app…really, really like some aspects of it), converted the smoothened SubD cage to a nurbs objects and exported as STEP to Rhino. Finished up all of the modeling in Rhino and then exported out to Arion Stand-alone for rendering.

I think it turned out quite good and found the tools to work very, very well all together.

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Hi PaulS,

It’s really a very nice model and rendering.

I’m using Fusion 360 too, for its T-Spline tools.

Just few days ago I decided to include it into my current pipeline :

Rhino V5,
Moi3D (best streamlined nurbs modeler of the planet!),
NVIL (Poly/SDS),
3D-Coat (sculpting, retopo, UVing, texturing, painting, retopo),
Thea Render.

Have a nice day,

  • Marco (mkdm)
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Very nice. Did you only use Fusion 360 for the Sub-D to Nurbs conversion? Have you looked at this at all? https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/modo/add-ons/plugins/power-subd-nurbs/
Wondering how it would integrate into the pipeline.

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Hi Aaron_Clark,

For my 3D works, outside of the products that I mentioned earlier (Rhino, Moi…)
I use only FREE software.

That’s why I use Fusion 360 and not Modo.

Have a nice day,

  • Marco (mkdm)
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I really like the quality of Arion, I’d never heard of it until I saw your last post. I’ve had a quick play around with it, I have an 8core i7 and a GTX 970 so 16 virtual cores and the 1664 cuda cores runs quite well on my machine.

Your pipeline is interesting… Lovely renders too!

I use:

Rhino 5/6
T-Splines for Rhino 5 (I hope they make a v6 version but I’m not holding my breath)
Keyshot 5 - All rendering. Not sure if I’m going for v6 yet, I might hold out for V7.
Fusion 360 for some filleting and meshing - it works well for converting .3dm to simple low poly meshes (especially T-Splines)
Meshmixer for other mesh stuff.

I’d never heard of 3D-Coat either until today, that thing looks very powerful but a whole new way of working for me.

Having the mesh to NURBS options with T-Splines has transformed the speed and quality/abilities over this last year. it’s not headache free but it’s enabled me to do some organic projects which would have been nearly impossible with Rhino on its own.

Great work!

Andy

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Thanks for all of the comments and feedback.

I like to use modo but actually would prefer Fusion 360 because of the built-in T-Splines…Modo is a more refined SubD modeler. But, I would have a problem spending $500 US just for a plugin which converts to nurbs and blindly while doing so when one can get T-Splines for Rhino and have full control or Fusion. I’m getting up to speed in Fusion and can for-see a time where modo might not be used.

I use Brazil 4 Rhino for a lot of my work but Arion has been a favorite for a number of years. Very fast and great interface for the Stand-alone version…I also have the Rhino plugging. I’ve recently tried iRay for Rhino and like it but it somehow feels a little slow but probably isn’t. I really like the fact nVidia is developing it as I am completely sold on GPU rendering. Great to see GPU becoming the rendering hardware solution of the future.

But, I love the fact that all of these pieces of software can read common formats and work so well together!!