Patch and Spline modeling - Survey (sorta)

Vailias

Just curious if anyone uses spline and or patch modeling on any sort of regular basis here. I'm making some non-real time assets using them in max and have fallen in love all over again.

Spline patching was the best way to get smooth organic base shapes back in the Lightwave 5.5 era, and now I'm finding a similar thing with the spline->Surface->Edit patch workflow.

Just wondering if anyone else has found use for this sort of thing in their workflow, realtime related or not.

MoP

I use splines a hell of a lot, but mainly as guides for deforming polygon objects, or simply as renderable lines for pipes/details etc.
But I don't think that's what you're talking about, so I voted no. I don't use patches, NURBS or Surface constructions at all.

[HP]

I replied yes, even though I rarely do it.

rooster

I'll loft some curves into poly objects, but no patch modelling

renderhjs

same as MOP,- I use them a hell lot for guides (path deform, extrude, sweep,....) but not in the old school way like NURBS and caging - thats just way to much work to construct & tweak, moving verts is way faster and convenient.
So I voted no

Joshua Stubbles

Only thing I use splines for are large curved objects that require precision. An example of this would be the road surface in Forza3.

CompanionCube

i use loads, don't know what i would do with out splines

Mark Dygert

Yep just like MoP and Renderhjs I use splines all the time, but not for surface modeling.

Yozora

Vig wrote: »

Yep just like MoP and Renderhjs I use splines all the time, but not for surface modeling.

ditto

Frump

Another vote here for using them all the time, just not for surface modeling. It always translates back into Polygons.:)

EarthQuake

no. sub-ds.

Neavah

I use them for every character - the hands, and face at least. easier to get the right topology for me...

throttlekitty

I'm with the larger crowd here, but do you find some things easier to create via patch modeling?

Vailias

Fun to see the other responses.
I realized after posting this I should have mentioned WHAT I was modeling that patches were so useful for.

I'm making cartoonish clothing, shoes last night.


This all has started from one or a couple of splines, caged then some patches detatched/copied and altered via extrudes or bevels and some manual editing under edit patch.

I'm finding the bezier interpolation of the full curves to be quite handy for controlling the shape, where if I were using polys and turbo smooth I'd need a lot more control edges and manual vert tweeking.

A lot of the advantage here lies in the end product of being a fairly high count cell shaded model for non-realtime applications. Were I to make this for real-time there would be fewer pieces to hold the shape and a lot of the interior detail would be textured, rather than modeled. I'd likely not use patches for..anything other than maybe normal map source materials for cloth or something like that for an end game res piece.

Edit: Here's the wires, Patches on top, polys from patches on bottom.

oXYnary

I use patch modeling sometimes. Sometimes getting face topology is easier to setup and get just where you want it versus having to sub-d and hope it divides close to what you are after.

Haven't used it much lately though with mechanical models. Still, nothing beats.

Sub-d though is much faster to get something out.

Patch, btw is NOT like nurbs. Why I outta smack the person around who uses them in the same sentence. Nurbs suck and give shitty topology when converted. Im having to clean someone elses work who used nurbs and converted into meshes. NOT FUN! :P