T-Splines: Breathing New Life into NURBS

By Matthew Sederberg, T-Splines, LLC

I enjoy reading the forums at highend3d and other sites to see what the current buzz is about. I am particularly interested in discussions that debate the relative merits of NURBS and subds. From the standpoint of our company, we hope that these debates will eventually die down because T-Splines will predominate.

T-Splines is breathing new life into NURBS, the decades-old modeling standard in CAD, industrial design, and animation. Using NURBS is viewed as a necessary evil by many of the modelers I have talked with: they need the precision NURBS gives, but dealing with tangencies between patches, seaming, and manipulating is a headache. T-Splines allows modelers to keep all the benefits of NURBS, but not worry about most of these problems. T-Splines allows modelers to create seamless models when they would have used multiple patches in NURBS. This is possible because of our patent-pending T-Junctions, which facilitate incredible amounts of detail in desired areas of the model, while keeping the rest of the model light