What is your take on N-Sided Surfaces?

#1

N-Sided Surface is basically an alternative to NURBS. Basically, it can be used to create any surfaces with any amount of sides and support tangency as well.

My take on it that it is interesting because that would make modeling a lot more easier as you don’t always need to use square patches in order to create any kind of models. While there are topology problems when converted into polygons, that can be easily resolved by retopology solution. It’s almost as it seems that polygons will be replaced with NURBS and NSS for modeling purposes as it gets very arbitrary or at least there may be a shift of interest into these two techniques as time goes by. Of course, these two techniques are not suitable for animation, but eh ok. I have been considering using NSS.

#2

What exactly is an n-sided surface and what program uses them? You can assign tangency weights at each intersection (i dont know what you call it but the equivalent of a vertex)?

#3

NX softwares uses N-Sided Surfaces and there was this old program that is called freedimension. I don’t know what other programs used NSS. Right as of now, I only know very few programs that uses N-Sided Surface modeling technique.

Here’s some few images which is made with N-Sided surfaces.

I think you should get the idea of what is N-Sided surfaces.

#4

It looks interesting, but how is this better suited than nurbs? Especially when there are programs that handle nurbs so elegantly (rhino, alias) already?

You talk about character applications but as with nurbs, this looks like it would be hard to get the detail needed for any sort of realism.

#5

Hey man,

All your doing in the end is just making a bunch of triangles that your rendering engine (Mental Ray, OpenGL, Renderman) can make a pretty picture from. The advantage of using quads is that you can better control how the triangles are drawn. Things like Ngons are fine, as long as you’ve got some niffy software that can fill in those odd shapes with triangles efficiently. SubD’s, poly cages, NURBS, and other methods are all just techniques of making it easier to draw large amounts of triangles.

Unless your talking about CAD where you need the mathematical accuracy of curves, it really not that big of a deal what constructs you use.

The “N” comes from mathematics, and just means any whole number.

-AJ

#6

Isn’t that a bit like T-Splines for Rhino? I love NURBS, I really do, but I can’t get over the hit and miss meshing/export problems.

#7

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