CompuServe Messages

To ALL: I dabble a bit in sculpture (mostly wax and clay) and am interested in using the Amiga to help with some of the enlarging/construction plans. I don't know much about the various CAD/CAM programs for the Amiga, or ray-tracing programs, or even which type of program would address my needs. Here's the problem I wish to solve, and any comments would be welcome: How can I create a form in the computer and render it so I can look at it from all angles–from above, below, any side, and any combination thereof? Once that is done I would like to be able to slice it up electronically into horizontal slices which can then be used as a template to form an armature out of stryofoam or plywood or whatever. Imagine that I have a computer model of, say, the statue of Liberty. Is there a program which would allow me to "slice" it successively from the bottom up and give me a printout of the perimeters at various heights? I understand that the Renaissance sculptors used a method called "pointing" in which a frame was built around a model or maquette, and careful measurements were taken at various points by sticking a stick through the frame and measuring the distance in to the model; many of these points were taken and then laboriously transferred to a larger frame, and the process repeated in reverse. That sounds like a simple job for a computer, especially if the maquette, or preliminary model, exists in the computer's memory to begin with. What type of program do I need? CAD/CAM ? Ray-tracing ? I don't think I would need animation per se, except that it might be nice to move parts of the model around to explore how different constructions might work aaesthetically. Does such a program exist for the Amiga? How about on other formats? My own setup is a stock A2000 with a GVP hard drive (105 megs). I have one meg of chip ram and 2 more megs of ram on the GVP card. I was thinking about getting an accellerator board sometime soon; if so, I would wait to expand my ram, if needed, with chips the accelerator board could use. Again, any and all comments are welcome, including "yer a crackpot–Rodin