Are NURBS a thing of the past?
 

I am fairly new to Maya, and have been learning NURBS modeling the last few months. NURBS are not really hard to use, but things like trim and attach surface drive me up the wall. Maya keeps saying NO! after I trim or attach once or twice on a object. I never have figured out what the rules are, or why it limits my attachments and trims.

So the other day I read something about the fact that some 3d movie houses are going all Poly and sub-d modeling now. It seems that sub-d modeling is slowly filling the NURBs modeling needs.

So, does this mean NURBS are going out of use, and that a person should concentrate on modeling with polys and sub-ds? Maybe I should just start modeling in polys and sub-ds for my scenes and forget NURBS.

Kori

I find it so much easier to acheive what i want in polys and sub-ds, but nurbs are still used a lot in the film industry.

I personally DO think Nurbs are becoming less and less a priority. In earilier days, when you smoothed a polygon character a time or two, it was literally impossible to work with the sucker, hence the importance of Nurbs.

These days, that's not necessarily so much a big deal. Of course, Nurbs always have their pros that go along with their cons. I usually use them for eyeballs and the like.

Everythings going polys. NURBS are too much of a hassle (IMO). Polys are simply. Plus, they are used in games. I started out using NURBs, and converted over to polys, cause its so much easier for me. Plus, I never could figure out how to texture nurbs all too great ne ways. Heh. :)

And sub-d is the best of both worlds - smooth like NURBS, and almost as user-friendly as poly's. However complex models are a bit of a strain on viewport performance.

look at the article on alias.com.. weta basically ditched nurbs all together and went subD... Gollum in fact is a subD and right there says it all.

I find nurbs good for roughing out big shapes. Usually I convert to polys at some point though...

Whats Gollum?

Ive never used nurbs except for a mel that turns curves to tubes... but even then its rarely.

ive never done much in theway of animations so far, but how would you lip sync gollum in polygons? wouldnt NURBS have the advantage there?

it'd work pretty much the same, really.

but with NURBS you can smoothly and easily warp, lets say, a pair of lips, but with polygons, how would you distort the lips smoothly?

polygons can smoothly and easily warp as well. It's just a matter of smoothing the model afterwards for rendering and the quality of the topology of the model.

will this work for key framing animations?

wouldn't see why not. Literally, you can use either geometry type for any situation. One just might be easier than another, depending on the scenario.

ill, have to go experiment with that, thank you

I'm all polygons when it comes to modelling pretty much everything :p All except cars. For me, modelling cars in NURBS instead of polys is the way to go.

The best thing i can say is to use them all. Maya lets you perform even conversions from nurbs to anything else.

If your working on multiple platforms that may not support sub d, model in Nurbs and transfer it over.

If your working exclusivly in Maya, model in Nurbs and convert to sub D (or poly if low resolution is acceptable).

The clear benifit of nurbs is the modeling speed. If your really good at nurbs modeling, doing rough out shapes will take you no time at all. Compared to doing it strait in polygons, Nurbs with isoparm insertion takes as little as 20% of the time.

For example, model an eye in poly and model one in nurbs. with nurbs you automaticly follow an edge loop, with poly you have to make your own. with Nurbs your construction is automaticly uniform, with poly you need to split surface all the way around your model (unless you use 3 gons or 5gons, which are cumbersome when converting to sub D for Mental Ray).

Nurbs have definatly fallen a notch on the ladder but will never be off the ladder completely.