Nurbs curve to poly

[meltwell]

mayans

how can i create a polygon directly from a nurbs curve?

i do NOT want to go through 'planar' as i do not want a tesselated surface.
i want a polygon that i can then extrude (or whatever) using poly tools.
is there a script around for this???

many thanks
mel

[alts]

i am not understanding - do you just want a curve that has straight edges? curves cannot be polygonal. you can, however, create a curve that has straight edges by using a 1 degree curve and then slecting the extrusion output geometry to be polygons. does this help?

[meltwell]

there are some distinct advantages of working in polys:

• polys render in the hardware renderer, curves do not
• eliminating gaps between the front face of something like extruded type, and the side. 'planar' always produces gaps, no matter what the resolution of tesselation.

however, modelling with curves has many advantages as well:

• they are smooth, easily editted.
• imports from illustrator come in as curves.

so, i would like the flexibility of curves as my initial outline. and then i would like to convert these curves to a polygonal face.

for instance: lets say that i want to do a motion blurred, multipass hardware render of a sheet of circles deformed by bends and twists (as we did recently for an e3 demo for microsoft xbox). the only way to 'create' a circle is with nurbs. then i had to trace this with the polygon tool, SO THAT IT WOULD RENDER in the hardware buffer.

there are many uses for such a tool and i thought someone had written a mel script that did it. curve2poly. has anyone seen one??

[alts]

i understand the advantages of both.

i'm sorry i did not understand your question.

good luck.

[kensa-jk]

I think what you mean is can maya create a 2 point poly like lightwave, which I dont think it can. What I would do is create a linear curve and then use the curve2tube.mel script somewhere on this site to create nurbs geometery from the curve and then convert this to polys.

hope this helps