Convert Polygons to NURBS
In car industry and also in product design, Maya is used a lot because it offers a very useful feature for design: Converting a polygon model to NURBS patches. The benefit of that is that later on one can export that out to IGES or STEP, and further add details to the model in parametric modelling tools like Creo, CATIA or Solidworks. The workflow would be: model difficult organic shapes in Blender, thicken in Blender, export to NURBS, model screwdomes, ribs and fixing elements in parametric software, and then 3D print the part.a starting point could be this documentation here: cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-773.pdf - maybe it contains useful information for developers to implement such a feature. Note that support for trimmed NURBS surfaces is not needed (and AFAIK not implemented in Blender), as the converted patches are always non-trimmed.Currently we use Blender to model our geometry, and Maya to do the conversion. This is an uncecessary step inbetween from my point of view.
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It's also a problem for me. I work as an industrial design (for automotive) and I need Maya to import and convert my mesh. It's for me the only missing feature on Blender for the industry. With this feature, Blender can have a big impact on the automotive industry.
For those who need this, there is a addon called "IGES Addon" (search it with your favorite search engine), it works perfectly to convert quad meshes into nurbs !
how do you convert polygon model to nurbs patches in maya? poly->subd->nurbs?
* @june.wang05 * yes that's the procedure. PTC Creo 4.0 and above also offers the possibility to do such conversions via FreeStyle features. Creo uses OBJ as a file format to transfer the data over, you do the imports from within a FreeStyle feature.
* @Rainer Trummer * Is PTC Creo approach good? I tried using meshconv + Freeship, but the exported .igs file has holes on the surfaces boundaries (adjacent surfaces not necessarily align)
* @Rainer Trummer * Just installed PTC Creo 6.0, which application do you use for the conversion? Creo layout or direct or parametric or modelcheck? You mentioned using Maya to convert too, does it also work, maybe easier than PTC Creo?
Would love to see this. Modo is another example of this workflow.