hatts wrote:Good info. Leads me to another question though; wouldn't procedural maps work on NURBS? Or some other form of vector (as in, not-raster) maps?
Hmm...not that I can think of and I'm pretty sure there's nothing like this in the market.
Nurbs-polysurfaces, even in good models simply don't come with a clean, evenly dense common structure - something which would only
roughly lend itself as an equivalent to UV-islands in meshes. What makes up a solid may be highly precise but the inherent structure
is super diverse indeed - very dense and complex surfaces next to super simple ones - all with arbitrary and non user-editable UV-orientations.
Then there's trimmed surfaces - which under the hood still have their original size but get displayed with certain portions of their extends
suppressed. If one still somehow managed to apply a procedural texture to the raw Nurbs it would show all sorts of densities and orientations
as also Isoparms are oriented in most diverse directions too. Also without a secondary structure I could not imagine editing flattened islands
independent from the actual 3D geometry - something which is a breeze with meshes and makes this workflow so powerful.
If the desire is to work on textures with the same control as available on meshes I can not see how one could do this without a (far simpler) secondary
structure –
maybe a mesh
. To me the lack of texture support seems like THE conceptual weakness of the whole thought of Nurbs rendering - but
I'm no Nurbs developer - and certainly was extremely pleased to get proven wrong...