Recently, I’ve been branching off of the rather limited world of Studio modeling and trying my hand in Blender, 3DS MAX, and Maya, finally deciding the latter to be the one I was most interested in. When taking a look around, I noticed two possible modeling types: NURBS and the more commonly used Mesh type. Here’s where my question comes in: is it reasonably possible to use NURBS to create studio models? While meshes are cool and all, the precision and possible ease of workflow of NURBS (if you get good enough) is quite enticing. Note if this question makes some of you vets out there want to jump off a bridge, I’m really inexperienced, my only 3D modeling experience being in Studio and DOGA L3 if any of you even know what that program is.
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I would love to be able to use NURBS in Roblox!
From experience and what I’ve seen from people requesting mesh deformation as an alternative to R15, there is currently nothing like this in Roblox. Closest we have is water.
I looked into it, there are plenty of threads asking for mesh deformation specifically for characters, but not NURBS. You should make a feature request for it (if you don’t, I certainly will, you brought up a good point). I’d prefer using control points to deform a mesh but NURBS are easy.
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Deformation to create custom destructive environment? Sounds like a plan. I would probably experiment with it later in Blender to see what creations I can cook out of it.
Does not approve that the category is #development-support:building-support… but apparently the OP is a new memeber.
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Yes, in a manner. NURBs can be used to create models that are then converted to meshes before being imported into studio. I seriously doubt we will ever see that supported directly in studio (if that is what you’re asking).
The first game I worked on was a Playstation 1 title (which was cancelled due to Playstation 2 coming out). Long story short, I was using Alias (precursor of Maya), which had good support for NURBs, and using that was my first thought since we were building vehicles. When it came time to convert the NURBs to meshes, I remember having trouble reducing the dense geometry down to something usable and dealing with cracks where surfaces met. Even with those kinks worked out, that workflow was too slow for production, and the build team changed to a program called Softimage where we had better vertex level control (of meshes). Precision was more about achieving perfect placement of vertices to get the best look using the least amount of geometry. Working from simple shapes and adding detail where it was needed turned out to be a faster approach, and NURBs weren’t helpful in that respect.
Anyway, that’s all anecdotal and possibly way outdated (I’ve only used NURBs a couple of times since then and not for a game). Give it a try and see how it works for you. Generally speaking, you can use whatever methods you want to create your models as long as you can convert them to triangle meshes before importing to Studio.
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I was wondering, are you talking about NURBS support directly in Studio? If you are, I don’t think a feature request is going to get you anywhere. As of right now, we don’t even have vertice and face control, so I highly doubt they’re going to insert the complex algorithm of NURBS into studio. The studio mesh system right now is meant to be easy for beginners, and adding in any of these features would increase complexity and therefore defeat the simplicity the system was originally intended to have. Despite this, It would be cool to have these features, and props to you if you do request it. If they add it, I’ll have to eat my words on this one.
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