CompuServe Thread

Mark, I've been using AutoSurf for a few months now, mainly to model cars. An expert witness I work with bought a copy (~$6K w/ Acad and the IGES trans and the training (2 people for 40 hours)). I'm not sure how that breaks down. Its a seperate program, but I believe it will be an option to AutoCAD 13 (like AME is currently). The tools in AutoSurf are very nice and quite robust. Massivly superior to what AutoCAD has now. It uses NURBS, and so you don't deal with polygons until you convert it into another format which requires them. You can do things like extending one curved surface until it intersects another, trimming a surface against another surface, offsetting a surface, adjusting a surface using 'handles' – pulling it around in real time, filleting surfaces, creating surfaces from arbitrary spline cross sections (without regard to the number of nodes)… I think its really quite impressive. All the models I've created with it I've imported to 3ds. You currently run a seperate program to convert from AutoSurf's native format to IGES. Then you run the IGESIN command to load it into AutoCAD. From ACAD, you DXF it out. Then read the DXF into 3DS. Then you delete the all the damn intermediate files… The IGES translator requests an allowable 'chordal deviation' from the NUBRS surface to the polygon mesh approximation. The first time I ran it, I accepted the default of 0.01" or something <g>. This created a preposterous number of faces. When I set it for 1/8", it was much more reasonble. The cars I've done look great in 3DS. I think for this kind of modeling, the two together make a nice solution. I think I will pick up a copy for myself when its an AutoCAD option, and when Autodesks' "all over the place" pricing structure offers it for a fraction of its normal cost <g>. Mark

AutoSurf has not yet been released.