ofer Posted August 22, 2008 Share Posted August 22, 2008 Hi! Im doing some experiments with the NURBS tools in Houdini. I never used NURBS in any other package. I always used polygons. What I'm trying to do is to create gun barrel with lots of jittered holes in it. Creating the pattern is not a problem, but creating the hole is. I start with a NURBS tube, carve a small patch from it, project a circle on this patch, trim it, scale the result a little, merge and bridge the profile curves. It works, but the resulting surface is very uneven. I mean, the bridged surface has lots of uneven and unnecessary isoparms, it is bumpy, and the is a visible seam between the surfaces. Am I doing something wrong? NurbsSeams.hipnc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
old school Posted August 22, 2008 Share Posted August 22, 2008 Toggle imperfect back on. Toggling imperfect off will cause unequal weights applied to the cv's to render a "perfect" NURBs circle. It's mainly in the Project SOP. - Set the Fit Tolerance to a smaller value. Say 0.00001 - Turn on Super Accurate Projection. Projected Circle: -Increase the number of divisions on your projected circle to say 40 will give the Project more to work with. All the NURBs tools are only single precision. Bridge SOP: - Turn off "Preserve Sharp Corners in the Profile Extraction folder. Increasing the LOD in the viewport to say 3 will render a nicer result at the expense of speed. This is accessed in the Viewport Display Options dialog / Viewport > Level Of Detail. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ofer Posted August 22, 2008 Author Share Posted August 22, 2008 Thanks a lot! I also found that reducing Order in the Project SOP to 2 gives the best results. It looks smoother now. Is there any way to procedurally bridge more then 2 profiles in one SOP? I mean, If I have a sphere with many holes, can I bridge everything with one SOP, or do I have to manually create a Bridge SOP for each I want to bridge? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digitallysane Posted August 22, 2008 Share Posted August 22, 2008 It's mainly in the Project SOP. - Set the Fit Tolerance to a smaller value. Say 0.00001 - Turn on Super Accurate Projection. I also like to use parametric projection (the second tab in the project SOP), I found that sometimes it gives better results. Dragos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ofer Posted August 22, 2008 Author Share Posted August 22, 2008 OK, Ill try. I just realized that even now there are still cracks in the surface, which are visible from some directions. Maybe there is no way around it? NurbsSeams.hipnc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digitallysane Posted August 23, 2008 Share Posted August 23, 2008 Maybe there is no way around it? Actually, there isn't. This is a common problem with trimmed NURBS in animation packages. In CAD software the precision is higher (and the approach different). I love the NURBS toolset of Houdini feature-wise, but their "geometry kernel" is lacking precision in such situations, for some reason so i won't bother with this type of things if surface seams are big on screen. It will be hard to get rid of them. Dragos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ofer Posted August 23, 2008 Author Share Posted August 23, 2008 Yes, I figured its a precision issue. Well, back to polygon tools I guess. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stu Posted August 24, 2008 Share Posted August 24, 2008 Yup, there are reasons that nurbs aren't used very often anymore, and it looks like everyone trying to use them here recently is discovering why. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ofer Posted August 24, 2008 Author Share Posted August 24, 2008 yes Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Serg Posted August 27, 2008 Share Posted August 27, 2008 I was playing with moi3d the other day. Very easy and quite fun nurbs modeller, the viewport display is great (no cracks seams), but in the end useless because Houdini couldn't display/render my model at anywhere near the same quality (imported Iges). I suspect this has a lot to do with the simplistic way in which the geometry gets tessellated in the viewport and render, as well as precision. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Serg Posted August 27, 2008 Share Posted August 27, 2008 I was playing with moi3d the other day. Very easy and quite fun nurbs modeller, the viewport display is great (no cracks seams), but in the end useless because Houdini couldn't display/render my model at anywhere near the same quality (imported Iges). I suspect this has a lot to do with the simplistic way in which the geometry gets tessellated in the viewport and render, as well as precision. Just to correct myself... moi3d isn't useless because the obj export/tessellation is excellent. Sesi should have a look at its tessellation options. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kodiak Posted August 27, 2008 Share Posted August 27, 2008 Just to correct myself... moi3d isn't useless because the obj export/tessellation is excellent. Sesi should have a look at its tessellation options. Hey Sergio, I seem to remember conversations about IGES and Houdini single vs. double precision (and trimming) issues back in the 3.0 era, so there should be some information about this in the mailing list archive. Tessellation shouldn't be a problem, I remember rendering quite heavy CAD models in PRMan exported from I-DEAS and PRO/Engineer (that's how I got into it in the first place) other tessellating raytracers (maya software and some early versions - maybe 1.9 - of mental ray hooked into Pro/E) just failed on them because of the same issues. I don't think this changed since, so Houdini might have a precision issue with some of these rather than tessellation problems. There is also an solution in PRMan called binary dicing that sometimes helps these cases. Oh man, dealing with NURBS feels like memories of a previous life now Take care, Andras Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Serg Posted August 27, 2008 Share Posted August 27, 2008 Hey Sergio,I seem to remember conversations about IGES and Houdini single vs. double precision (and trimming) issues back in the 3.0 era, so there should be some information about this in the mailing list archive. Tessellation shouldn't be a problem, I remember rendering quite heavy CAD models in PRMan exported from I-DEAS and PRO/Engineer (that's how I got into it in the first place) other tessellating raytracers (maya software and some early versions - maybe 1.9 - of mental ray hooked into Pro/E) just failed on them because of the same issues. I don't think this changed since, so Houdini might have a precision issue with some of these rather than tessellation problems. There is also an solution in PRMan called binary dicing that sometimes helps these cases. Oh man, dealing with NURBS feels like memories of a previous life now Take care, Andras Hi Andras, By tesselation I mostly mean the results you get in H when you convert to poly's VS what you can get in MOI's obj export options... you will get much nicer poly output from MOI, particularly when dealing with trims/blends etc... At rendertime in H I also had issues in these areas that would only improve by bumping the shading rate to 3 or 4 iirc... very odd. cheers S Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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