Hi Joe,
The trimming I was refering to is, if you do a curve array, in the tight corners you'll end up with what looks like this:



If you select these:



Then run the "Trim" command from the edit menu, it will look like this:



You can hit done or right click to accept and leave all the pieces there, then go in and delete what would be overlapping pieces:



Then you end up with more manageble/workable curves:



With these curves you can do some extra work to get your surface through those tight areas.





THe other thing I mentioned was about trying to do it with 2d operations. If you did the stepover math and knew how many levels you would need to get a clean surface cut by doing level profile cuts with a ball mill or something, you could go to a front view and array a bunch of "levels" up in the Z direction.



THen you could trim those curves with these level lines and get a result like this:



This would give you segments at various points on those curves that would have "end snap points" on them:



I could then use the curve through points command to draw curves by snapping to the endpoints of each individual section:



BTW: I used the new MoI scene browser to assign a style to each level. THen I could hide all others and work with one level at a time.


Or I could pick each level seperatly and loft just those little short pieces (It works better than trying to do the entire large curves that bunch up more) to create a surface, then join them all together for the larger surface that I can do a 3d toolpath on:



Just a note: the last lofted surface picture is deceiving in that it wouldnt be just a straight forward loft. I would have to fix a few areas where the gaps were not well defined to keep the loft going in the right direction.

Still with a bit of practice, MoI will do anything you want it to do!

Hope that helps a bit and didnt just make it more confusing.

Burr