Hi Frenchy... this one is for you, or anyone else who wants to chime in. I'm working on an article for Fast Company on the future of medical drones (oui, quelle coincidence vis a vis Bulgarov!) and I need to create some photorealistic renderings by next Thursday. Instead of working in MoI, I chose to create concepts in SketchUp primarily because:

• SketchUp has instancing-- important for creating one 'side' of a model and having it automatically update on the other 'side.'
• SketchUp has hierarchies-- very important for moving groups of components.
• SketchUp has sketchy renders-- very good for communicating concepts.
• SketchUp has SketchUp Warehouse. Posable humans and other parts are valuable when trying to 'kit-bash' something together. The 'humans' and stretcher on this model are from there.
• SketchUp seems to me a bit faster in creating stuff like this. I really don't need to worry about fillets not working or blends failing, etc.. In SketchUp, booleans pretty much never work, and it's difficult to fillet or chamfer anything even though Fredo has some great tools.

So, I've got the design (shown below).

I need to import it into MoI to start detailing and was wondering if there are any 'best practices' for this sort of thing. I was planning on importing the wires and working from there. Just found out that the Obj23dmWireframe_converter is windows only and I'm on a Mac. How to go from OBJ to Nurbs on Mac?

Not sure how to handle linked hierarchies-- I suppose just remembering to select named objects when translating? Also, it would be so cool to be able to have instancing-- that way I could create placeholders for parts, then detail a single part (like a quad rotor blade) and they would all update.

Anyway, any thoughts on all this would be appreciated! :)