hello,
Here's my progress in getting MoI and Nurbs modeling skills. Long time ago around 1997, played a lot with beta or Rhino. Now, just discovered how poor were my skills from 1997 - in my defense, can say that demands in these times, were.... smaller, and machines weren't that strong. Rhino wanted some time just to display the shaded mesh, today it's in real time. Back to Moi and 2014... intentionally tried to add details, that usually belongs to texture trickery in rendering, like small insets, fillets. Actually everything here has small fillet of few millimeters - compared to length of airplane of about 17 meters.
Few, very personal findings
Only DCC app, able to import and render this thing as NurbS, seems to be Maya. SI and Max, the same thing. IGES is recognized, but import takes minutes, with crash at the end. I believe the number of allowed trims per surface is limited in these apps. Form what I heard, Houdini seems to be somewhere in range of SI or Max, when it comes to complex trimmed NurbS structure.
So, polygons are rendered, huge meshes, having an old school 'user normal' property. Hopefully 3Delight's path tracer, which rendered this, supports the user normal thing, too.
Theoretically, all this could be done in Maya, but MoI's workflow is totally addictive, things like RMB for enter key in executing session, or repeat the last command out the executing session, a lot of streamlined procedures, navigation relies only on mouse, so on and so on. While Maya workflow when it comes to NurbS modeling, well I don't know what this is, yet. To be fair, 3d app, focused only to Nurbs modeling, could afford the streamlining. For example, no dealing with object's SRT, as modeling app has no object based SRT.
First and last screenshot is SI, the rest is MoI. As I mentioned, pics were rendered with 3delight's path tracer, a bit more than half of hour per frame, on home Quad Core machine.
Somehow forgotten feeling....
