Dear respected members of this community,
since I am confident that progress on NURBS tools and SDK would be
beneficial for a relevant part of the Softimage userbase, and it seems
to be useless to just ask in the beta, I'm starting this petition:
http://www.change.org/petitions/autodesk-softimage-management-improve-nurbs
... for which I kindly ask support from anybody that sees an advantage
in this!
Thanks a lot!!
Best regards,
Eugen
Here's the text I put on that change.org page:
"Working with NURBS is still awkward due to a number of bugs and
restrictions in Softimage and it's SDK.
Since NURBS are and will continue to be a viable geometry type useful
for many worflows, they should be subject to an upgrade, which last
happened in version 5.0, about 8 years ago!
Improvement list, sorted by importance:
- fix NURBS related bugs as has been reported in the beta,
- support subcurves and subsurfaces in SDK and existing tools - as
consistently as polygon islands,
- improve the operator SDK, to allow seamless integration of custom
tools, including NURBS,
- add support for NURBS in ICE Modeling,
- add new NURBS tools (once a fully capable SDK is provided, this can be
done by 3rd parties also),
- ideally, introduce T-Spline technology (owned by Autodesk).
Affected areas:
- curve to polygon modeling, like 3D text, logos, mechanical parts,
floorplans, cross-sections, spline cages,...
- ICE based procedural modeling and rigging approaches for more complex
animations and visualizations,
- better import/editing/modeling of technical geometry like cars, design
objects,...
To Cory Mogk -
Why NURBS should be improved:
First, Softimage users should not be forced to switch to other
applications just for basic curve/surface modeling.
Curves in particular, as they represent 2D-geometry, will always be
fundamental in 3D graphics.
Second, ICE support for NURBS would lay the foundation for new
procedural modeling/rigging workflows that would make Softimage
competitive in that field.
Understandably, the Softimage developers are under time and monetarian
restictions, so only high priority features get realized, mostly
introcuded by bigger studios, and often behind 'closed doors'.
Yet those studios rarely request any NURBS features. The reason might
not even be that better NURBS would be useless to them, but because they
mostly can choose from a wider variety of tools, and often stick to
internal proven workflows.
Yet the other huge part of the userbase, small studios/freelancers,
would profit directly from better NURBS, but easily go unnoticed.
Polygon modeling based on curves is an important and reasonable
complement to the already good modeling tools in Softimage, but is still
unnecessarily complicated and restricted, and this petition is meant to
show that the interest is there.
So please improve NURBS again and thus boost Softimage's usability in
that area a great deal!
Thank you!"
