thanks it's making more sense now. looking at prices and features of various products still. 3dcoat seems to be a lot cheaper than zbrush. i watched some viacad and 3dcoat videos. in the 3dcoat video i can see what you mean about tolerances not being that close. it seems like the main point of it is to shrink the mesh. i think in the viacad video he mentioned tolerances and did a check for max deviations. but that was to the already retopo model. which like you said is rough.

i'm not really sure what i would want at the moment. it's more academic. i was just trying to figure out a workflow i could recommend to prop design users.

the method i was going to do was just use the stl as a guide to move the airfoil sections then re-loft. i'd still need to import an stl file. but that could be done for free with meshmixer. it would just keep the original triangle mesh from what i saw. it just saves that as obj.

so i guess i'm considering two different workflows. i'm not sure which would work better. i'd have to create models, do fea, etc... so that's a ways off.

i'm also trying to find something for inertial properties still. ashlar-vellum looks ok but it's pretty expensive. based on acis kernel so they probably have to pay a large licensing fee. viacad is very powerful but i don't like what i've seen of the interface. i'm done with rhino. so still looking on that front. i'll still keep rhino v5 because all my work for prop design was done in it. but at least i won't have to use it anymore. other than to look at an old model if i need to. i found that the dimensions weren't transferring to moi, when working with a forum user here. a lot of my files have dimensions in them. i can live without the zebra plot. so not worried about that.

can't wait for v4. counting the months. so right now i'm looking at moi, 3dcoat, and something for mcad. stuck with old keyshot too. all my prop design stuff is in that and unfortunately i can't get the same results with simlab.

anthony

i had one thought on the tolerance issue. since the parts are pretty smooth wing shapes. i would imagine it wouldn't be too hard to change the triangle mesh to a quad mesh. but maybe i'm wrong. they aren't lumpy faces and things like that. they would start of as moi lofts. go to fea. i find the cold shape. which is a slightly distorted version of the blade. then unfortunately that comes out as a triangle surface mesh. but it's still not too different than what went in. mostly it's the meshing errors. i guess if you didn't have a high mesh density it could be a problem. also for composite shell models i wouldn't need the retopo at all. that could just be converted with meshmixer. so i don't know. i'll have to think about it.