So what do people use to model their 3D/game/animation assets with? Meshes, Patches or NURBS? Personaly I use spline-cages to generate most of my objects as patches, using extruded tris to create buildings and other regular geometric objects. double.

Meshes. I don't know why... just seems easiest to me. Methods of extrusion, cutting, welding, merging, etc. all work great in my opinion. I used to work with splines, but the more I did that the more I realized that models could easily be broken down into basic shapes. I didn't have to go to the trouble of drawing splines myself, and then extruding or surfacing, and then polishing. Basic Mesh shapes are easily modified and quick to make.

As ever,
***Cosmic***

Depends of the situation . Nurbs is just a modeling tool like all the others ...

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Original post by tiles Depends of the situation . Nurbs is just a modeling tool like all the others ...

NURBS can be more than a modelling tool, unfortunately there is no rendering hardware to render NURBS specifically, so the true flexibility of the 'tool' hasn't really been tapped, but like I said I don't use them any-way, I can approximate the techniques using Patches and Meshes (if I'm willing to create the detail myself). But you must have a primary modelling method, everyone does.

Which 'tool' do you prefer using?

double.

IMO, it is easier to start with nurbs or some spline-based surface to get the generally desired shape, then convert to polys for micro-management.

i also find it interesting that hardware support for nurbs rendering is non-existent. the process of reducing nurbs to polygons, or directly rendering a nurbs surface seems straighforward enough to be easily adapted to hardware.

The thing you gotta realise about putting a model into a game is that the higher the polygon count, the slower the game runs. NURBS isnt used so much because it uses alot of faces to create the image.

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Original post by Garmichael The thing you gotta realise about putting a model into a game is that the higher the polygon count, the slower the game runs. NURBS isnt used so much because it uses alot of faces to create the image.

Only because the object has to de degenerated to tris/faces pre-render. The actual data to describe a NURBS or patch object is much less data (about 3% of the mesh data for equivalent detail) which would actually make it faster if GPUs could render true-NURBS.

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NURBS isnt used so much

in games, but only because the hardware doesn't support it…… yet? Sony's press release on the PSP says that it will support them, I guess this gives an indication of where its going to go.

The Incredibles movie uses NURBs, pretty much exclusively, but Heavy Iron (who made the game tie-in) didn't. Obviously because of the restrictions of rendering hardware.

I wonder what non-game-industry artists use, primarily.

double.

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So what do people use to model their 3D/game/animation assets with?

meshes.

Nurbs are not an alternative for game models, plain and simple. The 'situation' is always the same for games = do lowpoly models, there's no situation where nurbs can be used.

We use Nurbs and Patches for hipoly models to bake normalmaps from (ala Doom3) for the lowpoly ingame (mesh) models, the nurbs/patches models themselfes never go into the game, and can't be used for anything else game related.
Also, all the nurbs hipoly models are redone from scratch as meshes to be used ingame, since there's no reasonable way to clean up the nurbs models to be used ingame.
In the time it would take to clean up a nurbs model to the desired poly count you could build 4 new beautiful ingame meshes, and im not even exagerating.

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Original post by StrangeFate Nurbs are not an alternative for game models, plain and simple.

I never suggested they were. The reason they're not appropriate for game models is the rendering pipeline, which is tri based.

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The 'situation' is always the same for games = do lowpoly models, there's no situation where nurbs can be used.

I disagree, if you set up the control mesh approriatly, you can generate clean degenerate tri-meshes of different LODs (for use in pMeshes). Like Starbreeze did with The Chronicle of Riddick.

Any-one from other industries?

double.

ps. checked your site SF, nice work guy.

hmm control meshes can be sometimes used to get the lowpoly model, right. It all depends of the complexity of the hipoly model tho. The stuff we're doing is between 50k and 4Mio polygons.
I could sometimes do a 2Mio polygon model with about 70-150k patches (if it doesnt have too much intricate detail), which translates in about the same amount of nurbs. It's quite insane to try to salvage anything there to make a 3-5k polygon ingame model. Poly reduction tools/plugins etc aren't really a help.

For simplier models it sometimes works to use the control mesh as base to do the lowpoly, in such cases the lowpoly model is so simple that you could quickly build it from scratch again tho.
I dunno what amount of detail they put into the Chronicles of Riddick's normalmaps but our stuff is too detailed to even think about about doing anything with the control mesh alone.