I am willing to take the initiative in creating an add-on which will directly help import Rhino ( .3dm) model inside blender. This is an Idea. Raw at this stage but have some crazy minds who are willing to make this happen. Who is willing to participate/contribute/join in this mission ?
Critics & supporters all welcome.
Because Supporters are involved in building something while Critics help to make it fool-proof !
Base info - ( Ref. Rhino3d.com ) OpenNURBS Toolkit consists of C++ source code for a library that will read and write OpenNURBS 3D model files (.3dm). More than 400 software development teams and applications, including Rhinoceros®, exchange 3D models using the OpenNURBS (.3dm) file format.
Benefits - This should open the blender to huge CAD applications to transfer models for further processes.
OpenNURBS is just a file format reader/writer, the much more important part is support for (trimmed) NURBS surfaces inside of Blender, which currently doesn’t exist. The last attempt at this was in GSOC 2014, but none of it ended up in Blender.
That is the way for me, Rhino can export a bunch of mesh formats, but will be necessary to purchase a license, and import to rhino (a lot of times with pretty bad results) and then export to obj, vrml, stl, etc. Solidworks can export to 3d afaik, then i just should need to open the exported 3dm in blender and then choose the mesh resolution inside blender. That will be awesome :spin::spin::spin::spin::spin::spin:.
Keep going pleaseeee:D:D:D any work in this area will be better than our present situation.
I forgot, rhino just work in windows and mac, a lot of Bheads are (me tooo) in linux, GNU-Linux, or whatever to please Stallman.
I only need the tesselated model. Getting a 3DM file and being able to load it right inside Blender (and being able to set the tesselation parameters there) would be awesome. Way quicker than firing up Rhino just to tesselate and save to .fbx, which I then load into Blender.
In order to do that, you need support for trimmed NURBS in Blender. OpenNURBS is just a library for a file format, it doesn’t give you a tesselator or any of the facilities you actually need for doing anything useful with NURBS. It assumes you already have that.
I would be very interested in a good rhino to blender converter, unfortunately i don’t know programming to help.
I think that rhino is just the best software for Nurbs and modeling geometrically correct shapes. I recently had to to the 3d model for the interior design of an elliptic sommer pavillon and did it using Rhino it exported it very well to Cadworks ( wich is a niche sofware for the wood industry) using the .sat format wich surprised me.
Normally when i export fro rhino to blender i have to turn the nurbs model into a mesh wich turns into a mess and because we convert a nurbs into a mesh.
In Cadwork i expected the same thing to happen but everything went smooth with the .sat format export/import.
Rhino is taught at our university as the main modeling software for architects.
As an engineering student we also have a have course to do parametric facade with grasshopper because facades are getting more and more complicated, so yes proper rhino to blender exporting would be a great addition!
Thanks for sharing views & discussing possibilities-limitations we might face during actual work. Myself Rhino Pro for last 10 Years have my own NFR copy & somewhat new to Blender but still love it a lot. Rhino being most versatile, powerful and very light tool will be a solid strength addition to Blender & vice versa. Well myself also not a programmer but very strong visualizer, I believe this should be very good add-on.
Reggev - Yes certainly but still why depend upon OBJ? its a mesh format, how about direct reader to convert B-rep into neatly organized mesh ?
Secondly There is a recent add-on which brings Sketchup files directly into blender. Development is an endless process.
Gottfriedhoffman - Thx. and yes why push Rhino to convert meshing ? fbx also is a monster of bugs ( I heard so )… LOL It will begreat to really solve trimmed edges reading issue.
Walten - Even I am not a programmer but have vision to do something like this. We surely have to study why it failed during 2014? as Gott… said.
titipuchal - Yes true but I hope those libraries are also available for other OS than win & mac.
Beerbaron - I guess we need a senior and hard core C++ & .net Techies to work on this.
Need to work on overall project budget as well. :)) Any hardcore programmers pl. Welcome and get in touch.
Rhino without any extra addons has so many export formats its incredible (around 30 different formats).
The quality of the software is top notch, in my university it gets used for many different things, for complex architectural forms, used for molecular analysis of material, we also use it combined with grasshopper to generate parametric facade that can be changed on the fly. It is the best software for complex geometric shapes, which is used a lot in architectural rendering.
What we need is a nurbs to nurbs export to Blender, I had to do the following bridge wich has to use geodesic lines order to be able to be built for real. I rendered it with blender , the mesh export forced me to correct alot of stuff by hand wich took alot of time.
Well, we are missing a point here, 3dm is a file format, the inner nurbs core in blender is a must. 3dm is widely adopted, however iges, step, sat and x_t are already established and almost universal formats in every cad package no matter if is mechanical, architectural, surfacing or kitchen modeling; as beer baron said earlier nurbs is the start of all the work in the import of no just 3dm but every single surface based file format. And i don’t know what is the 3dm advantage over the others besides rhino.
By the way just checked Solidworks 2015 don’t export 3dm but import it, so for me is useless, but as i said before, if nurbs land in blender, somebody will make an importer for any of the standard formats.
Rhino Inside not necessarily, but the Rhino Compute part will be useful. This I’ll be using for the meshing of Rhino geometry when none is found in the 3dm file.
Rhino Inside is geared towards the .NET ecosystem. I suppose we could try make it work with Blender as well though. Either that or the Rhino Compute part to utilize Rhino as the NURBS kernel in Blender.
