Hi Michael,

Thanks for giving this topic your attention. I'm working on a gun (a Desert Eagle pistol) and I have had no problems with solids on every other part of the gun, but the barrel of the gun has been consistently difficult to get right. I can get a solid on the front section and a solid on the rear section, but when it comes to making the two sections transition into each other, that's where things break down and I end up with a joined surface. I'll include a screenshot and the barrel isolated from the rest of the gun for your evaluation.

I think what makes this particularly difficult is that the cylindrical shape at the end has to morph into a really weird, non-cylindrical shape. The lofts I used at the junction between the two shapes get the job done, but I'm not terribly happy with the result. To give you the history of this model, it started out as a polygonal mesh that I converted to curves via the Obj23DM converter. I then rebuilt the individual pieces based on the volumes outlined by the imported curves. I started the barrel first and worked on other pieces after that. I export this back out to my polygonal modeler (modo) and then render out normal and ambient occlusion maps to a low-resolution mesh to be used in a game engine. I am finding that moi/modo combination is really powerful and I can make a lot of changes to NURBS and solids much faster and with a lot less hair-pulling than I can a polygon mesh.