There is a 3D Studio Max plug-in called “Rhino to Max” (see link below) that allows the user to select a Rhino 3D NURBS file and render it directly in Max, without having to convert to polygons beforehand. Since it seems to be creating the polygon translations on the fly during render, it manages to circumvent the memory restrictions associated with creating extremely high poly-count files that replicate complex NURBS or other CAD surfaces. Would it be possible to create something similar for Blender? I’m an industrial designer, and polygonal modeling isn’t very useful for what we do. It would be awesome if we could read our CAD files natively in a program like Blender! What do you guys think?
Blender has very good NURBS support. It’s not perfect, but a little effort, an you could get something out of it. Such a plugin may not even be needed…
No he/she means really big/fine nurbs. Well the short answer is no not really. Blender is a animation rendering 3d app from the ground up. So some of the scale issues you get with CAD have never been considered.
Having said that, since the ED devlopment Blender is much more scaleable than it was. I would try to see what order NURBS these are, and if blender supprots that.
There was a lot of enlightening discussion on related topics in this thread. If you’ve not already browsed it, suggest doing so (particularly cessen’s complex-math-explanations-for-the-lay-person posts were of interest to me…)
Altho a “one click” option like you’re suggesting is unlikely (blender, being multi-platform, isn’t as adaptable to any particular “plugin” architecture…) there are ways to import & tweak geometry that can both economize polycount-wise and closely approximate complex surfaces. Its just that you have to mess with workarounds and manual tweaking. Inconvenient, to be sure, but usually a learning experience in itself, and therefore of some value. I suppose its just a matter of how badly you want to be able to leverage blender’s animation and rendering capabilities for your projects.