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What happened to NURBS?

I

iosef

Member
Back in the day, when the DC had just been launched and the PS2 was imminent, there was much talk in console graphics circles about NURBS -- non-rational uniform B-splines. In layman's terms, NURBS would enable smooth curved surfaces in polygonal games, replacing, say, tires that looked like hexagons with real circles. It was thought that we'd first see NURBS on PS2 and that they'd be commonplace in future generations.

What happened here? My understanding is that some PC games have implemented NURBS (Doom 3 comes to mind) but that they've never appeared on a console. Did I miss something? Why is this no longer a focus? The absence of real curved surfaces really knocks out the feeling of immersion in an otherwise-engrossing title, like Uncharted.
 
archangelmorph

archangelmorph

Member
Doom 3 never implemented NURBS as far as I can tell...

The problem with NURBS is simply one of performance (i.e. they are EXPENSIVE)...

Interesting enough however, some hardware platforms (you know who you are!!!) actually provide hardware support for NURBS tessellation but again performance stinks so nobody uses it...

That's about it really...
 
J

jaundicejuice

Member
Polygonal modeling is better? I'd rather directly interact with a mesh via XSI, Max or Maya's polygonal manipulation/editing tool sets or sculpt in ZBrush or Mudbox than model with NURBS.
 
Freshmaker

Freshmaker

I am Korean.
iosef said:
Back in the day, when the DC had just been launched and the PS2 was imminent, there was much talk in console graphics circles about NURBS -- non-rational uniform B-splines. In layman's terms, NURBS would enable smooth curved surfaces in polygonal games, replacing, say, tires that looked like hexagons with real circles. It was thought that we'd first see NURBS on PS2 and that they'd be commonplace in future generations.
Click to expand...
That was mainly Next Generation swallowing anything Sony's PR put out whole.

Sony said "We're going beyond polygons."

Next Generation then decided the PS2 must be NURBS based, or perhaps ran on voxels or something....
 
G

gutter_trash

Banned
rainer516 said:
Came in here to post this. They're a topic in most numerical analysis courses in college but when you do the exercises, simple applications of the calculation models in MATLAB would bring my laptop to its knees, I can't see them being used in games anytime soon.
Click to expand...
back in the late 90s, Nurbs was the rage in 3D schools but then finally got slowly phased out in terms of usage

even if a character modeler did use NURBS, he would have to convert them the polygones anyway

even Z-Brush stuff gets converted to polys for games
 
S

Shig

Strap on your hooker ...
You're in a gaming forum. There's nurbs all around you.

6546_1170964347.jpg

NURRRRRRBS!
 
R

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
Theyre expensive and kind of hard to work with. NURBS are used extensively in Product Design though. Plus, sub-d's are better :D

Oh also, software packages like Maya and Max REALLY SUCK when it comes to Nurbs, they kinda stopped supporting them.
 
Dacvak

Dacvak

No one shall be brought before our LORD David Bowie without the true and secret knowledge of the Photoshop. For in that time, so shall He appear.
NURBS take more processing power overall and therefore are less efficient. Plus, I would imagine that if hit detection were based on NURBS, you'd have even more processing problems.
 
C

Chris_C

Member
Normal Maps killed him, then took his lunch money.

I think NURBS are still pretty useful for symmetrical hard surface modeling though, like vehicles and such. Of course it's been 9 years since I did any 3D modeling so... I dunno that's still the case.

EDIT: I should clarify that this is assuming you're not working real time. They suck for that.
 
J

Jay Shadow

Member
NURBS are a pain in the ass to actually use. When NURBS were the wave of the future a lot of strides were made in Poly Modeling. Sub-D poly modeling in Maya was much easier for characters than NURBS was. Surface Tools in 3DS Max was much easier for patch modeling and converting to polys than building with NURBS was. Then normal mapping, Z-Brush, and Mudbox came around and that pretty much put the nail in the coffin for any NURBS in game possibilities.

Oh, that and most of the claims of the PS2 were crap.
 
C

ColR100

Member
Dacvak said:
NURBS take more processing power overall and therefore are less efficient. Plus, I would imagine that if hit detection were based on NURBS, you'd have even more processing problems.
Click to expand...
You never really use the base mesh as the collision anyway, most cases a seperate mesh is exported along with the normal. Could also just let the engine just knock up a rough one automatically, but usually it's inefficient.
 
S

Shin Johnpv

Member
Raging Spaniard said:
Oh also, software packages like Maya and Max REALLY SUCK when it comes to Nurbs, they
kinda stopped supporting them.
Click to expand...

This is partially wrong. Maya is actually really good with Nurbs, since Maya's Nurb stuff is all based around what Alias|Wavefront was doing with its Studio program. Which is an industrial design program that is used in like the Automotive industry and industrial design stuff where you need extremely high precision. Maya's Nurbs are not as precise as Studio's but they're still pretty damn good. Max's handling of Nurbs on the other hand does indeed suck donkey horse shit.

Maya still fully supports Nurbs, you just don't really see them being used in production any more. Least not for characters anyway.
 
R

R0nn

Member
According to some old speculations, which surfaced around the time that the low powered specs of the Wii hardware were revealed, the Wii would use a revolutionary NURBS based rendering model which would be much more efficient than a traditional polygonal rendering model. This would've meant that the Wii could ouput at least the same graphical fidelity as the 360 and PS3 while needing far less processing power and memory.

Anyone remember that? :lol
 
N

Narag

Member
Freshmaker said:
That was mainly Next Generation swallowing anything Sony's PR put out whole.

Sony said "We're going beyond polygons."

Next Generation then decided the PS2 must be NURBS based, or perhaps ran on voxels or something....
Click to expand...

I remember the Next Generation voxel article and to this day I wonder where my voxels at :(
 
R

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
Shin Johnpv said:
This is partially wrong. Maya is actually really good with Nurbs, since Maya's Nurb stuff is all based around what Alias|Wavefront was doing with its Studio program. Which is an industrial design program that is used in like the Automotive industry and industrial design stuff where you need extremely high precision. Maya's Nurbs are not as precise as Studio's but they're still pretty damn good. Max's handling of Nurbs on the other hand does indeed suck donkey horse shit.

Maya still fully supports Nurbs, you just don't really see them being used in production any more. Least not for characters anyway.
Click to expand...


My point being that in Industrial and Product design, people dont really use Maya to get their NURBS on (and they havent improved the workflow nearly as much as they have with polys and sub-d's)
 
S

Shin Johnpv

Member
Raging Spaniard said:
My point being that in Industrial and Product design, people dont really use Maya to get their NURBS on (and they havent improved the workflow nearly as much as they have with polys and sub-d's)
Click to expand...


Ok that's a completely different point which you didn't bring up in the post I quoted. That's not the same as saying "Oh also, software packages like Maya and Max REALLY SUCK when it comes to Nurbs, they kinda stopped supporting them." Because in regards to Maya that statement is false in both ways. They still fully support Nurbs in Maya and they also do not suck in Maya. I'm not trying to be a dick and argue, just that Maya is known to have really good nurbs as opposed to max which is known to be complete shit in them. Doesn't seem right to lump them together in the same train.
 
I

ILikeFeet

Banned
as an inept modeler myself, I hate NURBS with a passion. granted, they have their uses, but not to me. Subdivision Modeling fo lyfe!
 
R

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
Shin Johnpv said:
Ok that's a completely different point which you didn't bring up in the post I quoted. That's not the same as saying "Oh also, software packages like Maya and Max REALLY SUCK when it comes to Nurbs, they kinda stopped supporting them." Because in regards to Maya that statement is false in both ways. They still fully support Nurbs in Maya and they also do not suck in Maya. I'm not trying to be a dick and argue, just that Maya is known to have really good nurbs as opposed to max which is known to be complete shit in them. Doesn't seem right to lump them together in the same train.
Click to expand...

eh, sorry. Was just going for brevity. The internet tends to give my opinions different meanings :p
 
G

GDGF

Soothsayer
R0nn said:
According to some old speculations, which surfaced around the time that the low powered specs of the Wii hardware were revealed, the Wii would use a revolutionary NURBS based rendering model which would be much more efficient than a traditional polygonal rendering model. This would've meant that the Wii could ouput at least the same graphical fidelity as the 360 and PS3 while needing far less processing power and memory.

Anyone remember that? :lol
Click to expand...

I remember that same rumor about the Gamecube.
 
N

nightez

Banned
Sub-Division Surfaces are better than NURBs. They've pretty much replaced Nurbs for all high end 3D work in Hollywood.


..
 
1

140.85

Cognitive Dissonance, Distilled
nightez said:
Sub-Division Surfaces are better than NURBs. They've pretty much replaced Nurbs for all high end 3D work in Hollywood.


..
Click to expand...

Yep. NURBs have pretty much been relegated to sometimes being part of the modeling process.

Obviously if they offered performance gains for high polygon real-time rendering it would already have been implemented by now.

NURBs are just a way of manipulating polygons - in the end polygons are always rendered in the final frame. Things were fantastic back in the day because you could manipulate dense meshes with just a few control points.
 
I

i hate bees

Member
Before there were decent mesh smoothing techniques NURBS were the best way for making non-shite looking curved surfaces, that's no longer a problem and polygon modelling is almost always fast and gives you better control when modelling. NURBS are still pretty handy in Maya for some surfaces, NURBS in 3dsmax are crap as hell though, still they always end up getting converted to poly surfaces before they go in to games.

NURBS would have some advantages, like you could have a much easier way to make level of detail models, but hardware is so good at processing polygons now that I can't imagine NURBS ever getting a look in for real time stuff.
 
E

Easy_D

never left the stone age
R0nn said:
According to some old speculations, which surfaced around the time that the low powered specs of the Wii hardware were revealed, the Wii would use a revolutionary NURBS based rendering model which would be much more efficient than a traditional polygonal rendering model. This would've meant that the Wii could ouput at least the same graphical fidelity as the 360 and PS3 while needing far less processing power and memory.

Anyone remember that? :lol
Click to expand...
Yeah, was going to post this until I saw you did.
 
blu

blu

Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
nightez said:
Sub-Division Surfaces are better than NURBs. They've pretty much replaced Nurbs for all high end 3D work in Hollywood.
Click to expand...
well, nothing stops you from using NURB-based sub-division techniques in your geometry shaders. NURBs are just a way to parametrically represent a surface at stages of the pipeline where that makes sense. nobody said NURBa should go all the way down to the hw rasterizer.
 
N

nightez

Banned
Jay Shadow said:
NURBS are a pain in the ass to actually use. When NURBS were the wave of the future a lot of strides were made in Poly Modeling. Sub-D poly modeling in Maya was much easier for characters than NURBS was. Surface Tools in 3DS Max was much easier for patch modeling and converting to polys than building with NURBS was. Then normal mapping, Z-Brush, and Mudbox came around and that pretty much put the nail in the coffin for any NURBS in game possibilities.

Oh, that and most of the claims of the PS2 were crap.
Click to expand...

What made Sub-D's really take off was Gollum in Lord of Lord of Rings. They used a Sub-D program that was so ahead of everything else at the time called Mirai to model him. It was written by the same guys who made Mario Artist: Polygon Studio (which was a great box modelling app) for Nintendo. And also made software for the N64 dev kit.

Even Pixar had up until fairly recently been using NURBs for their movies like Toy Story all along. They've changed now. But that wasn't until all the other software packages like Maya and XSI finally caught up in Sub-D modelling.
 
N

nightez

Banned
blu said:
well, nothing stops you from using NURB-based sub-division techniques in your geometry shaders. NURBs are just a way to parametrically represent a surface at stages of the pipeline where that makes sense. nobody said NURBa should go all the way down to the hw rasterizer.
Click to expand...
I see once everything gets sent to the display hardware its all triangles. Animators don't like working with NURBs they say they're problematic, especially organic stuff. So I guess maybe the weakness is in the tools available to artists.


...
 
I

iamblades

Member
DX 11 tessellation supports NURBS and subdivision surfaces (among other methods), so it is finally hardware standard now.

As for why it's taking so long to be used for real, it's basically because of the advances in 3d modelling software that made it easier to model smooth surfaces without resorting to these techniques. Using curves to create 3d models can limit your freedom, compare using the pen tool in photoshop to the paintbrush tool, for example.

Basically the only advantage to using NURBS now is to use less memory bandwidth, as you just send the function to the gpu and the gpu creates the triangles. Also using nurbs should result in better image quality than using a displacement map for instance, but that depends on the resolution of the map and the viewing distance, so it might not be needed.

http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/CL15?type=wmv

Jump to 26 mins in for the tessellation info.

A smart dev can use this feature to improve performance, but it's not universally useful for every model in every situation.
 
S

Shin Johnpv

Member
nightez said:
Even Pixar had up until fairly recently been using NURBs for their movies like Toy Story all along. They've changed now. But that wasn't until all the other software packages like Maya and XSI finally caught up in Sub-D modelling.
Click to expand...

Actually Pixar switched ages ago. The short Geri's Game I believe was their first full production using Sub-Ds. Most Sub-D implementation in other programs is based on the Catmull-Cull Sub-d stuff. I remember reading an article that went pretty indepth about sub-ds and them being the future when Geri's game came out. They stopped using Nurbs back then. I would wager money that they were probably the first ones to majorly use Sub-Ds in production.
 
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