[alexcount]

I don't believe any plugin has NURBS support yet.
Anyone have a good quote from NL, about it's priority?

edit: the programs that seem to support (rhino, 3dsmax) nurbs convert them to poly's before rendering

[Maximus3D]

That's right, all geometry is handled as polygons in the engine. And i believe that to make Maxwell handle nurbs and other more sophisticated surfaces then the core needs a real good rewrite. Perhaps that's something for Maxwell 2.0

But better more optimized polygonal handling, more efficient wouldn't hurt with effective usage of instancing and only keeping details where necessary during the optimization stage in the meshing procedure. Perhaps NL can use some of their tech from Realflow there..

/ Max

[deesee]

Newb question here (sorry),

But I'm curious what the difference would be? Does the rendering come out better if the geometry is not converted into poly's?

Thanks,

deesee

[Maximus3D]

The advantage is you would get away from the problems tesselation causes as nurbs are always smooth and nice and you can zoom into them until you turn blue.

Tesselated objects (polygonalized) can be just the opposite, unless you use some clever optimization/tesselation technique to put detail where it needs to be you will end up with jagged polygonal edges and blocky looking objects. You won't get that with true nurbs support. But in the case of Maxwell i'd take a wild guess saying the core needs a total rewrite to get true nurbs support. And i seriously doubt that will happen anytime soon.

/ Max

[deesee]

Very good explanation max, I understood it completely. As a result, all I have to say is:

I have always been a strong supporter of Nurbs support in all my renderers!!



deesee