Hi Bruce, well SolidWorks is used most often for mechanical part design and for manufactured parts like injection molded plastics, stuff like that. It's really oriented towards that field of work.

It will probably be a rather awkward fit for using in a totally different field like architecture. I'm sure it would be possible, just maybe not a very smooth fit.

MoI is pretty similar to Rhino in general, but Rhino is a more mature program and has a lot more functions in it - however the flip side of that is it is a lot more difficult to use as well. If you wanted to use MoI or Rhino you might consider not picking exclusively one or the other but using both in combination - that would let you do simple things more easily in MoI and use Rhino for a bunch of other functions that MoI does not do yet. MoI and Rhino use the same file format so it is easy to share data back and forth between them.


But I'm not sure that I completely understand your situation - do you mainly already have 3D model data made in SketchUp that you now want to bring to CNC? Or are you interested in whole new system of modeling + CNC milling the results of that?

I mean really the #1 thing that comes to mind is that you might want to look at a 3D architecture program like Revit for example.

- Michael