Nurbs editor

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microelly2
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Nurbs editor

Post by microelly2 »

I'm looking for a Point cloud editor.
I want to use it to edit Nurbs surfaces.
My idea is to move selected points which are the poles of a spline face.
there is a functionality in Draft for 2D, but I never have seen it for 3D
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microelly2
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Re: Nurbs editor

Post by microelly2 »

select a pole point and change its height:
https://youtu.be/ueJwTi0WasM
murdic
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Re: Nurbs editor

Post by murdic »

There's a lovely surface and curve editor called PolyCAD by a guy named Marcus Bole on polycad.co.uk, it's a parametric ship modeler too. Not open but free, he requires registration, but it's the most intuitive curve/surface editor there is, IMO. Manual or numeric editing, plain English file format, so you can format an x,y,z list, declare it a mesh or a spline surface or curves or polylines, give the text file a .geo attachment, open it in PolyCAD and transfer as .dxf or .igs, even some ACIS .sat. Has zebra visual smoothing too. Only Windows, it's a small price to pay because it's awesome for what you want to do. Your youtube vid looks promising too, microelly2. Numerical editing?
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microelly2
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Re: Nurbs editor

Post by microelly2 »

hello murdic, thank you for this link.
nice to have a real application to see what is useful.
the publications of Marcus Bole are very intersting too, it will take some time to read all of the 900 pages.
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bejant
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Re: Nurbs editor

Post by bejant »

Very nice, microelly2! (It would also be nice to be able to move the points directly by selecting them in the 3D view and dragging them on a working plane)
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Chris_G
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Re: Nurbs editor

Post by Chris_G »

Hi microelly,
I made some similar experiment based upon looo's work on his Glider WB.
Here is a link :
viewtopic.php?f=24&t=14100&p=113216#p113216
I didn't push it further because I don't fully understand looo's code.
But I think his approach could be a good base for what you're after.
Chris
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Chris_G
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Re: Nurbs editor

Post by Chris_G »

You may also have a look at Ayam : http://ayam.sourceforge.net/
I don't really like the interface but it has some tools I'd love to have in FC.
I think the author based his nurbs algorithms on the "Nurbs Book" by Piegl and Tiller ( very interesting book ).
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microelly2
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Re: Nurbs editor

Post by microelly2 »

Thank for all these interesting links, I will read them during the summer holidays.
The Part.BSplineSurface() is easy to use.
Starting from a grid of control points first functionality will be:

create a generic flat control point grid
insert rows and colums of new control points
move control points (using xyz-dialer in a dialog instead of mouse interaction)
move a complete row/column of control points
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Re: Nurbs editor

Post by Chris_G »

That looks nice !
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Re: Nurbs editor

Post by murdic »

There's an interesting height field generator out there called "ZSurf4" which generates an .igs file of a nurbs surface from greyscale bitmaps. The results are good enough to use as bases for measurement and reverse engineering.
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