Hi Felix,
quote:
The only observation I can make about MOI at this time is that there is no layers and since "drawing" a complete piece like the "armoire" will require quite a few parts <...>
Actually, MoI does have a layering mechanism, it's called "Styles" in MoI since it is a grouping mechanism that controls the visual color of the objects assigned to it.
To use it open up the scene browser, by pushing this button in the lower right area of the window:
That will open up the browser pane, and then you can go to the Styles section, which looks like this:
There are various actions that you can do in the scene browser like hide or show an item slot by clicking on the eye icon, selecting them by clicking on the text part of the item's line, assign selected objects to a particular style by clicking on the swatch rectangle, locking, deselecting, ... See here for some more complete info on it:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference11.htm#scenebrowser
When you export to BobCAD, the styles assignment in MoI should translate to layers assigned within BobCAD.
quote:
If I understand correctly NURBS are basically mathematical objects and as such the resolution and or precision of a true surface is only limited in theory by the numerical precision of your computer.
Yes, this is correct - a NURBS surface is what is called a "spline" - it's a mathematically curved surface.
quote:
But in practice, for displaying or when some meshing is required (which must be almost all the time) the resolution and or precision must be limited by quite a bit such that it can be processed in a reasonable amount of time.
It depends on what particular operation is taking place - it needs to be meshed for display because a display mechanism needs to use your video card hardware and video cards only deal with triangles.
But other kinds of calculations like surface intersections or booleans will use numerical techniques that interact directly with the NURBS surface.
- Michael
