I spent some time searching for any old posts about T-Splines and found very little; which makes me wonder if any of you actually use it at work together with Rhino?
Considering most of you seem to use Solidworks (or other parametric modeling software at work… or at least that is the impression I get from browsing the past few years), I wonder if any have found T-Splines useful or use it in conjunction with Solidworks or with their Rhino to Solidworks workflow?
I am considering getting it and wanted to know what others thought of it? I’ve dabbled in the student version for a bit and love how free-form and easy it is to manipulate objects; especially complex geometry.
I work in the furniture industry and would have to say tsplines is pretty invaluable to my day to day tasks. Often times when a new product is launched the foam models are done in the flat (the way they will be made), so when a customer wants a rendering to preview cmf related things on a project, I’m caught without a actual model of what the upholstered furniture will look like. Tsplines allows me to quickly model pretty complex surfaces, quickly, with all the pulls and seams (or most of them, sometimes decorative sewing is done in photoshop to save time).
Though my experience is just within the tspline plugin for rhino (I have no experience with the rhino to solidworks tsplines transition), we use pro/e as our main modeling program, so anything tsplines related is just for me to create a quick rendering to get to a customer.
So I guess to summarize, it’s a pretty valuable tool for me to help visualize upholstery styles. I’m not sure how valuable it would be for something like consumer electronics or something exact like that. But for anything with foam and fabric on it, it’s saved me more time than it costs.
Well, thanks thus far for the responses. I hope more people eventually chime in as I’d like to hear from those in consumer products, electronics, housewares, etc who have found TSplines as useful as you, thecuster86. Thanks!
I believe that for production surface design T-Splines builds a prototype quickly, but cannot resolve the detail needed for a final result. The patchwork of surfaces that are built from the process make any post T-Spline work very problematic.