Hi Felix,

> I want to apologize for the time you spend with my silly
> questions. I want you to know I've appreciated a lot
> conversing with you.

Don't worry, it was no problem! :)


> and I know why I expected a different behavior. I've been
> using Skecthup for a while and when I joined (actually weld)
> segments together they become a continuous curve as in
> MOI but this even after extrusion (push/pull in SU) or many
> other operation.

Yes, the way SketchUp works is pretty different - SketchUp doesn't actually have true smooth curves in it at all, what SketchUp calls a curve is actually made up of a bunch of little line segments. A "weld" type operation in a polygon modeler is a bit different than MoI's Join function. MoI's Join is somewhat more like making a group, but kind of a special group where the pieces know that they are connected together either end-to-end for a curve or edge-to-edge for surfaces.


> It's not a CAM program per say and one of the notes mention
> to watch for breaks or segmented elements because the script
> interpret a break as retract operation.

Well, 3DS Max and gMax are polygon based modelers, so this was possibly referring to needing to have polygons welded together so that the triangles that make up a surface share a common vertex point which then can make it easier for program code to find adjacent polygons to traverse them.

The equivalent kind of "traversability" in a NURBS based program is having 2 surfaces be joined together so that they have a shared common edge rather than being 2 completely separate surfaces that just happened to be nearby one another.

So that edge that you were worried about previously was not a problem in this sense because it was a joined edge between 2 surfaces.


The geometry in 3DS Max and Gmax is made up of triangle meshes, so it's actually chock full of edges everywhere, it just won't display them all the time unless you are in wireframe mode. So I doubt that the CNC Toolkit thing is actually sensitive to just any edge or else it wouldn't be able to handle more than just 1 triangle at a time, that warning was most likely about an edge where it could not find another adjacent polygon that was hooked into the same vertices as the current one.


> But this maybe irrelevant with a true CAM program such
> BobCad that I intend to use.

You could actually find a similar issue in there, but just to reiterate - the issue is probably going to be if you have just totally separate unjoined surfaces as compared to surfaces that are joined together and share a common edge (making a connected skin).

- Michael