Hi southpaw - re: voxel manufacturing - that's certainly true that a voxel model can be produced as a physical object. But there's a lot more to the whole field of manufacturing than that - for example one big thing about part accuracy is making sure particular areas of the part are accurate enough so that they can be connected together with other parts. For things like that you can't just have something that looks generally circular for example - the geometry has to be accurate to a tight tolerance so you know pieces will fit together. In general both voxel and polygon sub-d modeling is more about smooshing stuff around so they have the kind of look you want, not about achieving a precise circular hole for mating parts and things like that.

So just in general polygon and voxel modeling are not widely used in manufacturing industries because of that, there are exceptions of course depending on what kind of thing is being manufactured.


> That's definitely voxel manufacturing. (At least, I think it is.
> Maybe it's converted?)

Actually it will typically get converted to a polygon mesh if it's being generated on a rapid prototyping machine - usually STL format is used for that which contains triangles in it.


> (And nurbs from moi are converted to polygons on export, right?

Yes, if you export to a polygon mesh format like OBJ, LWO, STL, FBX, or SKP.

There are other CAD export formats which contain the NURBS data, those are: 3DM, STEP, SAT, and IGES - these formats allow transfer of the NURBS data to other CAD programs.


> So, I could bring nurbs and patches to the same
> environment for lighting and such because they'd all be
> polygons at that point, right?)

Yup, sure you can combine together the outputs of various kinds of modeling programs within the same rendering program usually - most of the time for rendering output programs will output polygon mesh data.


> This leads me to another question. What are the limitations on
> the student version?

There are no limits in the software - it's the exact same software as the regular version. The only difference of any kind is that a student license is non-transferable.


- Michael