Hi Val,

> If you try to combine the two in free cad the operation fails.

So it seems to load it ok though in Freecad? Isn't Freecad in some kind of early Alpha release right now?

Why is it that you don't consider a boolean failure in Freecad to be a bug in Freecad?

It could certainly be possible that there is something about the deformed geometry that it does not like to handle very well, like some kind of lesser degree of accuracy between how UV curves and 3D curves relate to one another. It may be possible to do some tuneups in the deformers to help with this.


> If you open it up in Rhino it still has problems with the letters
> if you open it up in 123D the deform model doesn't show up.

For 123D I'd recommend trying SAT format instead, that may work better.

I tested importing your STEP file into Alibre and it seems to go ok into there.

ViaCAD seems to get stuck, I didn't wait for it to finish maybe it would after a while.

I also tried with CoCreate and it also seemed to go in ok there too.

It also works fine reading your file back into MoI as well.


Unfortunately it's not a particularly unusual thing for different kinds of CAD programs to have different sorts of peculiarities or problems with imported data. For some programs you may get a better result with a different file format.


> I would like it if Moi expressed some kind of clue that the function
> had failed just like it does now when you do a bad Boolean operation
> it turns the solid into a series of joined surfaces.

I don't see how just blowing up the deformed result into a bunch of separate surfaces would really give you a good clue as to what went wrong. Most likely it would just lead to the question "why is my result a bunch of separate surfaces, I did not expect that", without really conveying any particular information.

It's pretty tricky to do a good quality UI for actually making that kind of communication happen.

- Michael