aaaaah ok i see now. sorry, i'm still in a Sketchup mindset. that's why i tried making everything with lines first, to intersect the surface and have each point of the hex be control points for raising and lowering. that's the way Sketchup's sandbox works. it's clunky, but it gets the job done. however it does create objects with facets (which shows in the CNC'ed parts) and OMG does it take a lot of processing power when there are a lot of points.