Is CAD/NURBS-based modeling essentially superior to mesh modeling

rhino or 3ds, not sure which is better
fusion 360 just to be safe

It's all fun and games until you need it for animation/deformation/games.

Then you have to fucking retopo the whole model.

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>>578490
>when done convert to meshes
Yeah because that's just a one click process, right?

>>578490
Depends on your goal
NURBS are more precise but also a lot less performant. If your goal is designing something that you actually want to produce, NURBS are probably the way to go.
If your goal is CG? Stay away from nurbs.I've been a long time Rhino user who is now learning 3ds max and not only is it a lot faster, I find it also easier to model with it. All the modifiers do amazing things, and when you do a proper low poly and then throw smoothing groups, a chamfer and turbosmooth on there, you get a smooth as fuck model with perfectly clean topology.

Now idk about Fusion and it looks very nice. But remeshing in Rhino is an absolute pain. I'm on my phone but maybe I can post some pics later. The meshes rhino gives you are horrible for a CG pipeline. Not to mention the unwrapping tools are so bad, you can't even select edge loops. And there are no smoothing groups either, and Rhino does not automatically weld verts. So if you have a mesh where 4 faces are touching, you have 4 fucking verts there. So you have like 3-4 times as many verts... And You end up going to 3ds max anyway for unwrapping and smoothing groups.

Tbh I would just stay away from nurbs if you want to produce CG content and don't need to be accurate to a 0.0001 mm margin.

>>578490
This >>578549
Frankly, if you're good at subdivision surfaces, it's functionally almost the same thing as NURBS except you also get the flexibility of polys.

If you end up using Max, just start with a plane that has turbo/opensubdiv applied, and assign stack preview to something accessible so that you can constantly hop between poly and subdivision view. Then just shift-drag out new edges and follow the model shape you need, using as few polys as you can get away with, as control points for the subdiv rather than the surface proper.

>>578490
If we're talking about industrial design, you have to be a pretty fucking disciplined modeler to match the accuracy of a NURBS model with traditional poly-modeling. Putting a seam (like a car door) into a curved surface without destroying the original curvature is trivial with NURBS. With SubD modeling you have to put in a bunch of supporting splits/loops/edits to maintain something close to the original curvature.

It can be done though, and I think a lot of times people prefer "close enough" to dealing with geometry/tesselation from NURBS modeling tools.

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How good is Blender for subdiv or nurbs vs Max?

>>578660
Max smokes it in the pipe.

>nurbs in blender or max
How fucking inexperienced is this fucking board?

Use CAD for nurbs.

>>578660
this company made car designs with blender

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/mathilde-ampe-automotive-design-with-blender/

they have it up on youtube somewhere

>>578660

See now, thanks to all the memeing I'm not sure how serious you are.

>>578750

Okay then, which CAD program would be best for augmenting a CGI modeling toolset?

I don't care about nurbs-to-mesh topology so much as crisp, smooth normals as an end result, which require crisp, smooth high poly models. I voxelize and retopologize everything anyway.

>>578757
AutoCAD speedform if you want tspline modeling, otherwise AutoCAD studio if you want the highest quality or solidworks or fusion360 if you model small things

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>>578490
Another thing is that curved surfaces some times actually take up less space when saved take a sphere for instance, in order for it to look smooth as a mesh it needs a high polycount whereas a nurb can just consist of 3 isocurves.

>>578897
>take up less space when saved
And who cares about that?
Plus, to display nurbs, software actually creates a rendermesh, which tends to be very highpoly to display the nurbs accurately.

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>>578549
I agree, rhino's remeshing options are pretty shit. Pic is a model i made to be cnc'd. The right is the nurbs , the clusterfuck on the left is the OBJ mesh rhino produced. Luckily topology doesn't seem to be that important for digital fabrication. I've had a lot of stuff 3d print or mill well with terrible looking meshes. As long as the model is watertight topo isnt really an issue.

There are a couple of grasshopper plugins which can be used for better remeshing. I've seen some nice looking stuff using kangaroo or starling. That being in terms of CG rhino only seems suitable for archviz.

>>578924
It doesn't make sense to jump through a thousand hoops to remesh shit in GH tho when you could just model it in Max right away.

And no, Rhino is utter shit for Archviz for the aforementioned reasons.
.t using Rhino for Archviz

Maybe it's not as much of a problem for raytracing but going from Rhino into realtime engines is a pain in the ass