PS3/X360: The possibility to render 95% scene of StarWar EP3

[Laa-Yosh]

Try do do such bumpy details on a NURBS wheel. At this image resolution, there's practically no difference in the amount of CVs needed for a NURBS model and the amount of polygons for a poly model. It wouldn't save you much (if any) on transformation calculations and memory bandwith, but it'd introduce consideralbe calculation overhead on tesselation.

Actually try to model anything with NURBS... there's a reason the CGI industry jumped to subdivision surfaces.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I mean SDS translated into NURBS surfaces instead of tesselated into triangles. Model in a binding box structure, then interpolate that into a true NURBS surface instead of to polygons.

Doubt there's any hardware out there that does this, but it is an option.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

There's a discussion on HOS in the dev forum, it's more complicated. As a character artist, I only want SDS and don't care how they translate it to the hardware.
NURBS has its uses though, circular stuff like pipes, wheels are easier to model. But when you go more complex (bumpy tires, pipe intersections), you need trims and fillets and such which are hideously expensive to calculate and need lots of extra CVs.
Or you can work with multipatch surfaces which can rip apart if tangency is broken... Weta got so fed up with it they transitioned to subdivs during LOTR2s production; Pixar jumped at Toy Story 2; ILM sticks to some custom version cause they've invested 10+ years of R&D into it.
Then there's the whole texture mapping issue with NURBS which is a nightmare for artists again.

 

[ims]

Looks like the dead horse is getting beaten.... again and again and again. It's not in real time please get over it.