Autodesk has acquired certain technology-related assets from T-Splines Inc., a privately-held surface modeling software company, based in Utah according to this short press release.
“The technology acquisition will strengthen our Digital Prototyping portfolio with more flexible free-form modeling and will help achieve even closer integration between industrial design and engineering workflows,” said Buzz Kross, senior vice president, Manufacturing Industry at Autodesk. “T-Splines technology will benefit designers and engineers that require watertight surfaces for downstream analysis and manufacturing.”
The image below is from the T-Splines technology page for T-Splines showing a duck toy model converted from polygons to T-Splines to NURBS. The duck in the middle is done with T-Splines. “All T-Splines surfaces are 100% compatible with NURBS and create gap-free, smooth and manufacturable surfaces.”
It will be no surprise if we can see this added across products like AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, Alias and Inventor in the future. But from what I understand there is a lot of work to make a easy to use UI as it has been missing so far.
I'm very happy for Matt Sederberg, but I'm afraid that Rhino is going to loose one of its best plug-ins. If this happens, it could expose the limits of the slow speed at which Rhino is evolving.
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