Hi Mike, I'm glad that you are getting more familiar with MoI!

> One of the main problems with complex lofts or sweeps in Turbocad,
> is solids cannot self intersect on the path, but MOI does not appear
> to have this restriction as far as I can tell.

MoI will not prevent you from creating a self-intersecting surface for stuff like sweep or loft, but it can cause problems later on to construct things like that. It's ok if the only thing that you're going to be doing with the surface is to export it to make a rendering, but if you're going to be doing more modeling operations like things that involve surface/surface intersections, those will usually not work properly on self-intersecting areas of surfaces.

Basically a self intersection on a surface causes a solid that contains that surface to no longer have a distinct inside and outside region and so things that depend on a clear difference between inside and outside will get confused by such shapes.


> https://docs.imsidesign.com/display/TC19UG/Converting+a+SMesh
>
> If this works out as well as it is described, a major movement
> in the interaction between the two modelling methodologies

It seems to be saying that it will generate a faceted solid though - if so then that's not really going to be a viable solution except for certain special case type shapes that are actually meant to be faceted in their accurate representation, like a diamond gem or boxy stuff.

In general a solid that is made up of a zillion little triangle facets is not the kind of structure that solids modeling methods are set up to work with.

- Michael