Want powerful nurbs tools in Blender?
Thanks to the efforts of the NURBS fans on Blenderartists interest in libNurbana in Blender has been revived. I have been working away slowly on this project since the GSoC (3 years ago!?), but I simply do not have enough time to progress the project in a timely manner. The last time I got a significant amount of work done was during my summer holidays last year, where I refactored the entire project into a nicer architecture, without a chunk of time to work on it uninterrupted I find I cannot progress very quickly.
Two things have happened recently which will hopefully change the situation:
1) My employer has generously agreed to give me two weeks at the end of September to work on Blender.
2) As discussed in the thread above, several people (myself included) have pledged to donate money to any willing to help me with this project
I hope to use the two weeks to do two things:
– Make the current nurbs/ branch completely stable and bug free, as a replacement for the current nurbs architecture in Blender – Mentor a new developer to help with future NURBS development
There have already been a few suggestions for potential candidates for the coder, but I would like to make an open request on the list in the interest of fairness, and finding the best possible person for the job.
If anybody with experience in NURBS or Blender is interested in this project, please contact me. Please include evidence of your suitability for this role. The amount of money we raise and the amount of work expected will probably be comparable to the GSoC. The project will be broken down into sections, with specific ‘bounties’ for each section depending on the difficulty.
What does everyone else think?
For anybody that’s curious, the current nurbs/ branch in SVN should
build, but is ‘beta quality’.
-Emmanuel
Sounds great — I looked at the page, but didn’t see a “donate now” button. Is there an easy one-button link so that busy people like me can donate?
This is great news! I can only dream that it will be of the quality of MOI, but nonetheless, any improvement of the current nurbs system is a giant leap for the Blender NURBS system.
Wow, that’s really nice of your boss!
yay nurbs pwn
next add bullet 2.70 x3
This sounds like a good project. The current NURBs tools are interesting, but they could definitely be improved.
NathanKP – Inkweaver Review
It sounds like a cool idea, would boolean operations be possible with NURBS?
I’m really interested in nurbs development and I’m ready for a bounty.
What do you need more? :)
excuse my naivety but isn’t this a bit of backwards development?
surely the advent of subdivision surfaces / adaptive subdivision has nullified nurbs?
This would be great for building precise engineering models!
sounds promising hopefully they can raise the funds and we can play with nurbs soon.
@ wayne, you’re dead wrong. And that’s coming from a subsurf modeler.
I’m still psyched that it’s happening after all! WOOT!
@wayne
i think you have misunderstood the usage of nurbs. for character design, and other areas were you need total control over the mesh topology nurbs are pretty useless, but when it comes to architecture and product design nurbs are invaluable. They alow you to make mathematically precise models with complex shapes in a much more intuative way than in the case of polygon modeling and subdivision surfaces.
The addition of nurbs could make blender a proper production suite for product development and architecture and not “only” a visualization software.
To everybody interested to donate to this project:
The payments will be executed soon: if you want to pledge donations to show interest to the coder, please leave a name and an amount on the blender artists thread and the blog will be updated; otherwise send an email to Cekuhnen (info at (no$pam) ckbrd dot de)
..Then stay tuned to concretize your pledge it in a few days
lapinou
yeah that sounds great!
Nurbs Smurbs! haha…
Good start to constructive modeling. But I dont think blender will ever beat solid works.
Have you guys seen the features of that proggy? Two guys at our design studio master it and its way ahead of blender by any means…
Anyway… going to donate. Wanna see how this is implemented is blender. And maybe the dumbed down features blender now has can be smartened-up again.
Better NURBS is good step for blender(especially in architecture)
But…
Blender needs also(in my opinion) N-Gons! Every other 3d package using it now. Does project B-Mesh is still developed?
Anyway nice to see that blender modelling tools become better :)
Booleans will and should work.
Joeri, the goal is not to attack solidwork. That would be foolish.
Also NURBS is not NURBS.
But having decent NURBS tools will enrich Blenders creative output.
As said for characters SDS are probably much better today.
But with everything else polygon and SDS are not as good as to even
limiting and time consuming.
The idea is to have NURBS modeling for accurate and better control
and than mesh it for further work.
Claas
NURBS FTW! xD
cool, that’s great! best of luck to all who work on it!
God bless,
-b
http://minosafilms.wordpress.com/
Ok where does a noob go to find out what exactly is a NURB?
@Sienio – Yes B-mesh is still under development. It is part of the work to get a unified mesh subsystem. (Assuming I understand what is going on in development correctly) I wouldn’t expect that to land in the trunk until 2.50+
@ DrGNU – NURBS is an acronym for Non Uniform Rational B-Splines. (It means that surfaces are defined by math rather than a bunch of flat faces tiled together)
-FishB8
sweeeeeeeet! nurbs have kinda fallen out of favor these days and that’s definitely a good idea when it comes to characters… but there are some kinds of shapes and forms that just BEG for nurbs to be used! all kinds of really fabulous uses in terms of hard body models and industrial design shapes. nothing that really CAN’T be done in polys and subds but would be oh so much easier done in nurbs! also good as a rigging tool if we have access to u,v coords. so win win win! good luck!
Hello,
Anybody that is interested in helping develop new NURBS functionality, please contact me.
Please include evidence of experience with Blender and/or NURBS, and your availability schedule.
I will select the most qualified candidate soon.
The money raised will go to this coder upon completion of specific components.
Emmanuel Stone
[firstname][dot][lastname]@gmail.com
What a good news !!! I’m looking for a powerful and affordable NURBS modeler since months, and I was so sad about current NURBS features of Blender. For an amateur artist like me, purchasing Rhino (~1000$) is a bit overkill just for a single task.
Even if I’m a capable developer, I have neither experience of NURBS programming nor knowledge of Blender code. But be assured I really want you to succeed, so if you need some beta-testers or some other kind of help (eg, translating documentation), I’m in.
Good luck !
This will be a great addition for Blender. Looking forward to it!
I would love to see NURBS properly brought to the same level of functionality as the rest of Blender. I always found it strange that Blender doesn’t have top quality NURBS support, it would certainly make more types of modelling approachable.
Whoever picks up the code to get it fixed, much appreciated!
I’ve been hoping for blender good nurbs support for years, this would be just awesome !
You didn’t mention birail in your tool list proposal, this would be quite useful too !
I’ll join the crowd and cheer – this is coming from a mechanical engineering student, so I might be biased ;)
I’ve been watching NURBS in the free software world for many years. Active development is ongoing in K-3d, Ayam and BRL-CAD.
Blender can never be a real solid parametric NURBS CAD package, but being able to import NURBS into blender and manipulate the splines and surfaces to some degree, then polygonize it and export it to something like crystalspace would be really awesome.
Develop NURBS and add production-quality IGES or STEP export will make Blender more attractive to Product and Industrial Designers.
hell no. please. no nurbs tools. Don’t waste the time.
looks like i’m in the minority on this one! oh well…
Nurbs is a brilliant idea.
It would really help with my projects and I would really appreciate it.
Well N U R B S are great but what is greater …….. subdivisions like maya .
I like the modifier subsurf . But you still model with polygons.
I would like to see better modifier for nurbs.
thank you.
Yes yes yes….
Great ..dream come true..
The gsoc for nurbs ….
..unbelievable…