Vladislav Georgiev

March 2013. For this project I would like to make some notes about the study loop I had to do. I started to do a CG car modeling in Maya with  polygons which of course is not precise technique as we know the car designers are using programs as Alias Studio, Rhino, Solid Works and others to create class A surface famous among the people who are using mostly polygon modeling techniques as entirely different modelling universe - which sometime is exactly true and it has it's strong and week sides like the polygons have their own, but what I am trying to say here is that I kind of felt the same way earlier because I was only used to Maya NURBS tools. So I was thinking that polygons are good enough if you have the knowledge how to use them, and that is good but very often we can model something ten times more accurate and ten times faster if we use a traditional NURBS approach.



   After struggling for a while eventually I came to the realization that poly modeling is just not enough to provide clean and smooth surface for automotive parts but the same is also true for hard surface modeling and modeling in general. So I was thinking isn't it great that we can use NURBS tools in Maya to generate polygon surfaces and we can chose freely what type of surface to make at any given time instead of always hitting the box modeling approach. The problem with this is that the NURBS workflow inside of Maya is somehow slow , unnecessary complicated  and unstable comparing with some other programs like Alias Automotive, Autodesk Inventor and Rhino. And I think this leads to a huge gap between the two basic modeling methods inside of the program.



  So after searching around it turn out that it is possible to use a workaround by starting and doing most of the modeling in Autodesk Inventor or Solid Works (which are pretty much all the same CAD – and NURBS modeling packages) and eventually refining and rebuilding if necessary in programs like Rhino or Alias. And  than if we want to do an animation or texturing and go back to Maya we can export the resulted geometry as an FBX, OBJ ( if we need polygons ) or IEGS, STEP file format (if we want to keep the NURBS). Same counts for any rendering or poly modeling package it might be Maya, 3D Max, Showcase or any other similar type of software.

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  By using this technique it is not possible to maintain very low-poly and 100% quad layout.  So where this is necessary for texturing purposes there is no problem to re-topologize the resulted geometry. But very often this is not the case because for some parts of our models we only need UV's and no textures at all. And as we know all types of surfaces triangulate during render tessellation so usually there is not need to maintain polygonal workflow 100% of the time. The amount of surface control that we can take advantage of by using this technique and the high quality surfaces are worthed to go thru all that trouble to study all this different programs.    

 

​  Hopefully Autodesk Maya development team will make their mind and will decide to improve the NURBS modeling tools in Maya so we can use this great idea for NURBS modeling techniques for generating polygonal shapes without having to study two or three other different modeling packages and also more reliable and stable NURBS workflow inside of Maya itself - it has been started already but apparently latter it's been abandoned for some reason.  I am guessing here but it might be something like marketing strategy or whatever else but definitely not impossibility to continue the development of the NURBS modeling and the NURBS tools inside of the program.



   Maya is my favorite program and it is still one of the best around but unfortunately we have to admit that when it comes to NURBS it is foaling behind the competition.

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  Another option would be a file format that can maintain clean quad layout for exporting NURBS to Poly out of Rhino and Alias Automotive or even better straight from SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor. Why all that trouble you may say ?

   It is important to be able to take advantage of the both methods - inside of one piece of software -because having the freedom to switch back and forward between NURBS and poly workflows and combining their strength could bring greater flexibility that can be very useful.

   

   Ignoring all the great features of NURBS just because traditional polygon modeling is a bit easier is limiting the modeling process and I am sure that in future the gap between the two will be narrowed down for achieving a faster and more powerful modeling process. Instead of labyrinth of interface issues and two completely different directions in the design industry.