[Bf-committers] nurbana integration

[Emmanuel Stone]

On 4/18/06, Tom M <letterrip at gmail.com> wrote:
> could you give a brief overview of what needs to be done yet on the
> nurbs project to get it to a state ready for going into the main tree?
>  There were some questions on IRC regarding this, so I thought it
> might be something of interest to the general coders.

As it stands there is a working version in my soc-blender tree which
uses the nurbana code (converting nurbana from an application to a
useful library was one of the main tasks of my project last year). It
is mostly integrated, in that most of the old NURBS features in
Blender are implemented. Some of the features have not been
implemented because there are superior replacements within the
libNurbana code.  Some of the capabilities of nurbana have been
porting into blender, such as
IsoLines.

There are however some bugs within libNurbana which I have not been
able to track down yet (it needs a day of serious attention, and I
just don't have the time at the moment), which need to be resolved
first.

Basically what is left:

- libNurbana bugfixes
- (re)implementation of existing blender tools (some of these are done)
- New implementation of libNurbana tools within blender
  straightforward:
    [] non-destructive subdivision
    [] knot editing
    [] blend, loft

  not so straightforward:
   [] Trimming Curves (this is only partially complete within
libNurbana, Justin has said that he will work on it at some point)
   [] Rhino import/export (this is just a matter of reimplementing
previously present Nurbana functionality, so the code might already be
available from Justin)

Getting Blender up and running with libNurbana as a backend is pretty
much done. I am a little embarrassed that I haven't yet fully
completed this, but I have just been too busy. The rest is a
reasonably large undertaking in itself.

If people are impatient for this new functionality then I will be more
than happy to assist a new coder in taking on this project. Indeed it
would probably make a good
SoC project again (exposing all of nurbana's functionality was never
going to be feasible last year), especially if care is given to
considering the UI for such tools. I would certainly be willing to
mentor this project. Given that I know what needs to be done, and the
codebase, it might make more sense for me to actually do the project
however.

I hope this answers the question,

-Emmanuel