#Scalpel? WHY?
>>Not that I am defending slice (haven't even seen it yet), but booleans don't
always work, and that is a lot of steps. If they sold it for 40-50 bucks, it
might be worth it for someone who has a need to slice things.<<
I haven't seen the Scalpel routine either but if something needs to slice
things, I would recommend they first try the boolean method before shelling out
money for an possibly unneeded tool.
The steps involved can be shortened by saving the cutting boxes after creation.
Then when you need to slice something just duplicate it, merge a copy of the
cut boxes into the scene, scale and postion them as the cutting plane, and then
do the boolean subtraction. (This costs 0-0 bucks!)
Granted, booleans have been known to fail while trying to cap the cut, but if
the routine the big boys at Autodesk wrote won't work, I doubt you're gonna
have better luck with this IPAS.
The one thing I could see it helping with is doing cuts without capping the
ends. If the purpose of this routine is to allow slices without caps, it may
be useful to some, but I feel the 3DS user would be better served by adding an
option in the boolean dialog in rel 5 to do subtraction without capping. That
would allow cuts of any shape to be performed. (jonas?)
Tom Crage