Hi Burr, yeah unfortunately there has been something of a trend recently where some rendering programs say that they support 3DM files, but what they actually do is only read polygon mesh data from the file and don't attempt to process the actual NURBS/Solids model data itself...

MoI on the other hand only reads and writes the NURBS objects and doesn't try to do anything with polygon mesh data in 3DM at all.

It can cause some confusion having really different kinds of data like that potentially stored within the same file format.

It's kind of more common for file formats to only contain one kind of data in them, the person you were talking to was probably used to working with file types like that.

- Michael

Yeah, actually he was a CAD/CAM guy, who received a file from someone else, and couldnt grasp that an "OpenNURBS" file could contain anything that wouldnt be read into his NURBS based Cad/CAM program (3dm is 3dm, right!)....Convinced it was a bug and proclaimed the software programmers were stupid idiots! :o

Can you imagine?? "Michael doesnt know what he is doing because MoI wont open this 3dm file, that is HIS filetype!!"

Anyway, an example of the confusion you were pointing out..