NURBS or Illustrator?

[pyrognosis]

Maya is a new tool to me. I am working with NURBS curve creation tools and I am finding them quite limited to a number of tasks. For instance, to trace a scan of a particular hi-contrast logo in NURBS curves seems an excercise in humiliation for me!

Whereas when you create a NURBS text curve, right angles and straight spans are created, but using the NURBs tools as I know then to achieve similar ends from scratch has been brutally time consuming and frustrating.

So, I just wanted to know how many people here are as uncomfortable with them as I am for such precise curve generation?

Also, for tasks such as letter tracing or taking precise measurements from paper-drawn designs/scans and so on, Adobe Illustrator is an ideal tool to use and then import. Is it a cop-out to use Illustrator for these tasks or is it better to become as preficient in NURBs curves as I may be with the bezier control found in Illustrator and similar programs?

A simple example is that in Illustrator you can break tangents, where with NURBs curves you lose a great deal of simple control.

Thoughts?

[gmask]

I appreciate your familiarity with Illustrator and confusion when trying to do the same things with the Nurbs curve tools. You can use the curve editing tool to sort of do the same things you would do in illustraot but since you have go out of curve creation mode to use the tool it is a pain.

To trace logos and the like create alot of points near tight curves. In Maya 3 you can import illustrator files with EPS invigorator and have then imported as a nurbs curve.

In Maya 4 it imports illustrator files straight up so if you can do your tracing work in Illustrator and then import into Maya.

g

[growler]

The last time I tried importing Illustrator curves Maya made a complete mess of them- multiknots, reversions and inclusions all over the place. i ended up spending so much time rebuilding them that I've never tried it again.

Admittedly that was on the Maya1 Beta. have they fixed it on subsequent versions of Maya?

For me it's largely academic anyway, since Iearned Nurbs modelling before I learned Bezier curves- and I still find Bezier curves a pain in the @ss. Understanding the math behind B-splines helps a lot, I guess.

Just my 2c
G

"Dont worry, They'll fix it in post.....Huh? what do you mean, 'We ARE post'???"

[joojaa]

No probs with illustrator files.

About BURBS wersus Bsplines (like the ones in illustrator). Tracing with a nurbs is better than with b splines you just click on the boundary at regularinter walls and then your cure will be quite perfect.

NURBS is a more complex thing than a bspline and indeed bsplines are just generaklisations of nurbs surfaces. So if you REALY want to work on bsplines then you can, note however that a general nurbs surface is way more efficient. Heres hoe you do a Bsplines draw a cubic curve with one span (this is a bspline) then continue with a new curve for the next span. As you se a bspline is just abuch of interconnected 2 degree Nurbs curves.