CompuServe Messages

Hi Jerry, Check out AutoCAD r13s new solid modeler if you get a chance. If you really like to model using booleans (and it is a great technique for so many things) it's a must have. While r13 itself has plenty of problems (understatement) the new modeler is excellent. I have thrown some pretty wicked geometry at it and it does a great job – much better than Jim Turners one you refered to using at U of M. It has the very powerful ability to extude a section along a pline or 3dpoly entity and handles the corner intersection cleanup perfectly – I'm extremely pleased with it. It is also _much_ faster than AME was. You cannot however go back and edit the CSG tree like you could with AME. The only way you can export these models to 3ds is using the 3DSOUT command which has its share of problems but I think as these get more resolved the two working together will be quite nice. As far as booleans in 3ds, I consider it a major mathematical miracle that one can do booleans on surface models at all <g>. Just to give you an idea of the overhead require for solid models, I created an architectural scene last week where the building was done mostly as solids. It took 8MB in AutoCAD. The exported PRJ file with all materials and mapping took 70K inside 3DS. I think the overhead of working with solids inside 3ds might therefore be prohibitive. The idea that we will be able to run both 3ds and Acad at the same time under NT next year is quite appealing…especially if there is some way to cut and paste between the two. Hope things are going well in FLA. See ya, Mark