openNURBS- Rhinoceros and the Grasshoper

[jph_wacheski]

Just doing my normal morning coffee and random web searching when I stumbled into a blog that I found very interesting,.

http://spacesymmetrystructure.wordpress.com

then got intreged and looked into;

http://grasshopper3d.ning.com

that is very interesting to me, however seems to only be of useable in the $1000+ Rhino software,. DRAT!

then I noticed that that the creators of that software also provide an open source toolkit that could be interesting to some,. (C++ / .NET, cross platform)

http://opennurbs.org

perhaps NURBS are an area to explore for more procedral mesh generation,. a few control points and complex curved surfaces?

http://www.rhino3d.com/nurbs.htm

[Kjell]

Problem is that neither OpenGL, Direct3D or any of the other real-time 3D API's support NURBS natively, so you usually have to convert them back to polygons before rendering. All modern 3D application do support NURBS ( Max / Maya etc. ), but they are mostly used for non-realtime rendering of high-poly industrial content .. not to mention a pain in the ass to work with

K

[jph_wacheski]

That is what I am talking about, using NURBS to generate polymeshs for rendering,. as another possible mesh generation method. Just a thought, the links may be of interest to some.,

[Kjell]

Well,

That's the thing .. once you convert to polygons, you lose most of the complexity & curves again ( when targeting polycounts reasonable for real-time use ).

Anyway, some free NURBS applications*

http://moi3d.com/
http://ayam.sourceforge.net/

*Again, not recommended unless you're designing a bathroom sink that you want to physically produce at a factory.

K

[VilleK]

With geometry shaders you can use a non-polygonal description of your mesh to dynamically add vertices depending on surface detail and camera proximity, so maybe nurbs will get a revival. And sure it can be useful for new mesh-producers for static geometry in zge too! Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.