NURBS to poly conversion

[Steve Davy]

Anyone got any tips or suggestions for converting CAD models to polys fairly quickly and easily?

I have always found Maya's conversion tools difficult and unintuitive to use.

They're adequate when converting a single surface, but when trying to convert a CAD model consisting of multiple trimmed NURBS surfaces and trying to get anything close to a watertight polymesh out the other side, it's a big fail.

Is there a better third party app for doing this? Or, can it be done with Maya?

[mikael persson]

At a previous company of mine they were using software intended for lathe use to convert car CAD files to usable poly meshes. But that is not exactly fast nor easy to use. It was quite a bit of work to get it converted but you got very nice lightweight meshes.

I stumbled on a related tool recently that might help you out, Meshlab: http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ . Although I don't think it handles NURBS, but it does a fantastic job of downsampling heavy poly meshes. It is miles ahead of the built in tools in maya. But maybe they improved that in 2014?

Mikael

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[Sid]

Polytrans. Had one of our guys use it for a couple of projects, it works pretty well.

Sid 

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[Jan Ziemann]

We are using mostly Polytrans to convert different CAD formats to polys
in Maya. It comes with a plugin for Maya so you can import directly into
Maya.
http://www.okino.com/conv/pt4maya.htm

I have also used Rhino3D to convert some formats. Rhino has a fully
functional test version that ist restricted to 25 saves/exports. So you
might want to give it a shot.
http://www.rhino3d.com/en/download

But from what I understand it is always a problem if your CAD model
already consists of trimmed Nurbs surfaces. Usually you want to get them
as brep solids(??) in a format like .step or the native formats from
Pro/Engineer or Solidworks. These can be imported via Polytrans and the
appropriate converter modul.

Would love to hear what others use.

[ian zeigler]

Depending on what you needs are

for animation of heavy cad files i use and assign Mentral ray approximation editor and appy under Nurbs Tessellation options.  (sounds confusing) it renders the often wonky looking nurbs way better and cleaner.  if i need to convert to polys for UV and texturing / baking i use maya convert to poly options, get a pretty high res mesh and bring it into Zbrush where i run it through Decimation Master and it does an amazing job of poly reduce while keeping the form i need.

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[SEQUENZ | Lars Gerstenmaier]

Most of the time we use also Polytrans which does a pretty neat job in converting STEP or IGES or native formats. For wire files we also had used Showcase.

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[Armin Mueller]

MoI does a pretty good job and is easy to use.
http://moi3d.com/

[Milos Vukotic]

Interesting topic!

Ians approach is awesome, I use it often too, but how about when you actually care about topology? :/ Then decimation master technique wouldn't help much as it messes up topology and just makes sure that mesh itself looks correct.

I haven't heard of Polytrans before, I guess I'll have to give it a shot.

[Russell Harding]

I use nPower for Maya at work. 

http://npowersoftware.com

Fastest method we have found for converting our Pro-E models. 

Russ