Nurbs Modeling for XSI

[crgowo]

Id like to know as well... but i have heard that the nurbs modeling tools in xsi are not that great.

[opus13]

i was under the impression that xsi only really supported nurbs to the extent that minor modifications could be made with any efficiency... if you really wanted to. the tools wre more meant to clean up any imported surfaces, and not meant to be teh sole point of creation.

kinda like 3ds max i guess.

[erebos]

basically the guys at softimage have devoted a lot of effort into creating a stunning polygonal modelling toolset. As a result, the NURBs set has been neglected. The main reason behind this is that in xsi, sub-d's can basically now do everything which once made NURBs such an invaluable tool (the smoothness, low polygon hulls, weighted points etc.) and so there are very few cases when nurbs are really called for.

To quote an interview with Gareth Morgan (Senior Product Manager at Softimage) on XSIbase:
XSI mostly focuses on Subdivison surfaces and the NURBS tools were more or less untouched, can you explain Softimage's decision to focus on Subds?
First, it’s important to note that, although we didn’t invest a whole lot in the interactive toolset, XSI does have a full fledged NURBS geometry system, and if you’re modeling elsewhere, you can bring in and use NURBS robustly.
Sub-D’s offer more or less all of the smoothness and surface simplicity benefits of NURBS with the performance and flexibility of mesh modeling. They’re also typically lighter on CPU load. We’re not making a CAD/CAID product – XSI is an animation system, and people seem to agree that Sub-D’s fit the bill.
We chose to emphasize on Subdivision Surfaces because when we did the original research for XSI’s modeler, we got a lot of feedback that said that was the way we should go. Just because of time and resource constraints, it was also partly a question of doing one thing as well as possible, or both just things only adequately. We chose to do Sub-Ds – and hopefully we did the job right.



So i suppose there aren't many NURBs tutorials because people simply don't use NURBs all that much in xsi.




Cheers,
Erebos

[Rumr]

Yah nurbs arnt that great like in maya but i mean just use nurbs if its easyer to get a shape down or a morphed shape then convert. XSI's poly set kills. I love it

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