I was messing around with a program called Plasticity which allows you to use nurbs for modeling, and it has some really powerful tools in it that allow for great adjustable bevels, quick, easy, and accurate booleans, good array tools, etc. I know that if Blender had comparable features for its nurbs surfaces, modeling assets such as planes would be a lot easier, as they have many lofts to different sections along their fuselage. Not to mention the innumerable simpler, yet equally as important smaller assets that would have great time savings in creation using similar features.
So will Blender ever have features that compare for ease of use in creating shapes and forms that are currently very difficult to get right quickly and easily with Blender’s poly modeling style?
As far as better nurbs modeling goes, I would not get your hopes up.
The reason why is that there has been rumors and promises of better nurbs functionality to come since 2004 (not long after Blender became Open Source), none of that has actually come to fruition and the functionality today remains not that far ahead of where it was since Blender was developed by Not a Number (Ton’s original company).
The nurbs functionality is nothing than late 90’s/early 00’s code in place for legacy purposes, as any movement in that area should have the current code replaced by an entirely new system anyway. Nurbs modeling should not be done at all for projects unless you want to have a bad day.
It’s really not that bleak. NURBS modeling works quite well in Blender, and it’s unreasonable to say that there will never be any more development. We have no idea what the targets are going to be for Blender 4.0
You would first have to find a volunteer developer who has that interest (which is easier said than done, especially since you can now directly edit normals on polygon-based models to be more nurbs-like with Geometry Nodes and modifiers). The core team is not going to implement anything.
By that, I mean a developer who will actually create the patch and follow through with bugfixes and maintenance, which is why the BF often frowns on the idea of things like bounties.
While I would never say never with Blender (see colored wireframes, GI, ect…), I have seen enough attempts to not gamble on having Nurbs be a major component of my workflow (because of the high chance I will not see a boost from new Blender builds).
You don’t know that, none of us do. Again, we can’t speak in absolutes about future development, because it’s in the future and we don’t have roadmaps or targets for 4.0
I doubt that would be a target for Blender 4.0, that is supposed to be released in late November.
At last Blender Conference, they announced that they will work on Geometry Nodes for Grease Pencil, Animation tools, Asset Browser, Simulation Nodes…
We are at beginning of Viewport Compositing and Cycles Path Guiding.
And there are still a lot of stuff from past years to fix or polish.
Maybe at the end of Blender 4.x series, there will be space to review NURBS modeling patches.
But with geometry nodes and sculpt mode areas to review, that will be complicated for developers experienced in modeling to progress, if a developer motivated to improve NURBS shows up.
Geometry Nodes about Curves are almost as numerous as Mesh nodes.
Status of modeling tools encourage to use mesh surface generated from Bezier curves rather than using NURBS, since almost two decades.
The only FOSS software about NURBS, I know, that seems to progress and be accessible is Ayam.
Rhino does not have a ton of competitors.
There is not really a big crowd of users and young developers, interested by NURBS.
I don’t get the sentiment…you want to model with nurbs - use a tool that does that.
There is a reason why these exist and a mixed pipeline is easily possible.
Blender like any other DCC does poly-modelling and ease of use for some use cases does not justify the development effort which takes away resources that are needed elsewhere.
People have been modeling cars and planes for decades with poly modelling tools and if you think that is too hard for you than you have 2 options:
I think revamped surface modeling tools would be great to have. Especially in combination with geometry nodes, it could be powerful. Animation nodes and Sverchok are good examples of what’s possible.
There are two problems though, the existing very old / subpar technical foundation of surfaces in Blender, and the fact that surface/NURBS expertise is even more niche than regular 3D development. The first issue has improved a lot for curves lately, I think we have to basically do the same things for surfaces. The earlier attempts didn’t do that, which I think made the whole effort much harder. I described some of the first steps here: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/100127
Modeling in NURBS is awesome, as a long-time Rhino user I can attest. What I think a more attainable goal for Blender would be a better import feature of Rhino files or Open NURBS. It would be great to model in Rhino and move it over to Blender for rendering and/or animation.
i also haven’t used it in like 20 years. as far as i can remember the tools were kind of nice but getting triangulation settings right, so that adjacent patches didn’t show seams was a huge PITA. that always ruined NURBS for me. not that i was a NURBS expert though.
I was thinking Moi 3D, Rhino, Fusion 360 or Plasticity.
I know that Maya has a lot of Nurbs stuff, but nobody every talks about these and nobody seems to be using them…curves and surface operators - yes. But building stuff with Nurbs from scratch seems to be considered an “outdated” workflow by many. (doing this IN Maya is outdated).
I might be wrong here, but this is the mindset that I have experienced the most.
My criticism against Blender applies to Maya as well. Nobody truly wants that Autodesk wastes their developers time with improvements for Nurbs modelling.
If you truly need Nurbs - you just use a specialized software.
Yeah, this is what I feel as well. That for example in the context of games polycount is super important and everything has to be set deterministically. In animation topology is everything. In sculpting you get more artistic expression and freedom.
Nurbs is hated by many people, since it messes up the poly count or the topology, in a sense that the results are unpredictable (specially once you start doing bevel blending). At least that way, you might be able to get nice 3D surfaces, but still you will have to go through the tedious process to turn them to real faces, and then polish them in order to make them look good.
