Hi Will, sorry I misunderstood... But really many parts of your message seemed to imply that you could not accomplish some particular thing in MoI.
Like for instance here:
quote:
I know that currently MoI's booleans behave better when working with closed surfaces / solids so attempting techniques like this now might not be that fruitful.
That certainly sounds to me like you think you cannot do anything to cut up open surfaces in MoI because the booleans are oriented towards working with solids.
But again, the workflow is that you use Trim to cut up such things rather than booleans. Trim accomplishes that result and will allow those techniques to work.
Many other parts of your message seemed to indicate that you thought such techniques would not work in MoI because you were forced to only work with solids in MoI but that is not the case.
> I don't know if you've fixed this in the latest revisions of MoI
> so I've always tried to make everything solids while I work in MoI
> and delete faces in my poly apps.
It's not really something that is possible to be fixed - MoI needs to know about which surfaces have shared edges in order to make a consistent mesh with shared normals and shared vertex structures between each one.
That's not unique to MoI, it's the same in any NURBS modeling program that works with surfaces.
> So that was the final question I asked - is it okay to work
> with (and export) open surfaces?
It's fine to work with them, you just use Join at the end to glue them together as the final step before you export.
That's the same with other NURBS surface modeling programs as well...
Where did you get this idea that a NURBS surface modeler is going to export consistently aligned normals and a watertight mesh without having the connections between the surfaces specified?
Some programs may just call it by a different name than Join, like solidThinking calls it Sew I think for the same function. Also possibly some programs may do it as an extra calculation that is built in to the export process itself. I don't know if that is such a good thing to do since it would make it harder to examine the joined result and see if there were any problems.
- Michael
