Hi Mike,

> Just read the first snippet on Turbocad V19, which is going
> to have something they have called an SMesh or smooth
> mesh which can be created from a solid or surface, and
> has a number of mesh smoothness settings.

Looks like it's a sub-division surface which is a polygon modeling technique to work with a rough polygon cage and then produce a smoothed down polygon result from that.


That article you linked to says: "All Boolean tools can be used on Smeshes, as long as they are combined with other Smeshes or TC Surfaces."

So that sounds like for example you won't be able to do a boolean operation directly between a regular NURBS solid object and an Smesh object - it's kind of like there will be 2 different worlds that don't really inter-operate that much.

That kind of "separate worlds inside one package" can often lead to a lot of confusion, with stuff like some tools only being designed to work on one kind of object and not doing anything to the other kinds of objects.

If you want to do that kind of sub-d modeling, most likely a dedicated sub-d modeling package like Silo, Hexagon, Modo, etc... is going to be a better fit for that.

Things can get more interesting with sub-d modeling in CAD if the sub-d surfaces can actually be converted to a NURBS solid instead of only being treated as a totally separate polygon object type.

- Michael