Hi airdog - that gives me a lot better idea. I'll see if I can come up with a couple of examples for some different approaches.

One method might be to draw some curves and then build your model by sweeping along those curves to build things up in strips.

Or if you want to have one single surface and trim holes in that, you will probably make a closed profile in the elevation/front view, and then use that as the cutting object to trim, instead of trying to have trimming lines placed in the top view.

- Michael

It's funny because I just see something similar but with another prog :)
http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8067&p=47511#p47511

Hi airdog, this is the method that I would recommend for the "trim a single surface" approach.

If you are starting with a surface that has a bump in it:



Switch an elevation view, like in this case the front view. Then draw a closed profile curve. In this case I drew the curve in 2 pieces, kind of following along the contour of the surface, then I selected the 2 pieces and used Edit/Join to glue them together, the result looks like this:



Now to trim the hole, make just the surface selected, then run Edit/Trim. Then MoI will show a prompt in the upper-right corner that says "Select cutting objects", at this point select the curve, it should look like this now:



Push "Done" or right-click to tell MoI that you are finished picking cutting objects. Now the surface will get sliced up by the projection of the curve:



The prompt will now read "Select pieces to remove or push Done to keep all". You can now select a fragment to remove, like this:



And then click Done or right-click in the viewport to tell MoI you are finished picking pieces to remove, and this is the final result:



So I hope that might work as a way to do the trimming that you were asking about originally.

A bit later on today I will see if I can give a different example about building your thing in strips instead of from a single lumpy surface.

- Michael

Hi airdog, here is a kind of different method for building in strips.

What I did is I started by drawing some curves in the front view:



Here is what these curves look like in the 3D view, they are all stacked up:



Then slide them over to separate them, keeping 2 together in the middle:



Then select 2 of them:



And run Construct / Loft to create a surface between them:



Then select the other 2 and repeat:



This is the result:




I just put this together really quickly, I think you would want to probably be more careful so that all the pieces lined up on the right side for the middle pair, so that the 2 strips would touch exactly in that common area. Probably one way to do that would be to have the curves made up of more than one piece, and have an identical piece along that right side portion.

Some other ideas are instead of using 2 curves for a strip, you could gain some more control over the shaping by using additional curves like 3 or 4 curves for a single strip, and then you can get some more control over the shaping of the strip by having some variations in the shapes of those inside curves. Also another approach would be to draw some crossing pieces and then build the strips using sweep with those pairs as the sweep rails.

I hope this might be useful,

- Michael

Opens up some great visual potentials for me. thanks
Hexagon gets further and further away from my needs!

Cool Brian, it looks like you have got the idea there!

- Michael

thanks for all of the ideas guys!