I spent the last 8 days doing a number of things. I tried to give a whirl to a competing product, but I quickly abandoned that despite the immense lure of its nice bells and whistles which surely could be put to use. But, on importing into it my SLT-originated splines, it all looked like Crayolas on the screen. Exaspirated with that (same import matter as in 2012), I decided that as nice as the product was, I cannot spend the time on the learning curve. After around 30 minutes of it, I dropped it and went back into SLT and the limited, single-character keyboard shortcuts felt like getting back into a relationship that was more good than bad, hahah.
That product loses tool palettes when I click on my 2nd display, and I am NOT going to give up VirtualBox or wait around for that CAD vendor to cater to me.
I also explored a competing product that is ANOTHER very good competitor, but, it simply won't run in VBOX. The price we users pay when a given developer INSISTS on being STRICTLY ms-tech hell-or-high-water.
So, I decided to use online tuts of those two vendors to force me to do their examples in SLT. Overall, I was able to do it in SLT (copy a block, add some "tubes" some with slots or simple holes, and deep select rotate them to change the opening on the outer block/solid.
It was a fun challenge for me. SLT is not nearly as easy as those to do that simple thing, and it took me a while to remember to try Deep Select to get at the tubes/holes I made. But, one that gelled in my gray matter recall, things got straightforward.
THEN, I began to realize what all the frenzy (can it be called frenzy?) was about with getting mesh-to-surface in VCP/SLT. I'd so intently focused on "reengineering" my exploded solid/tubes model that I took to the route of decomposing it to a mesh and then trying to stitch the meshes back to a surface, to pretend I was reverse engineering somebody else's model. It was filled with grief.
About 40 minutes of that led to me realzing that I was wasting my time, since I'd already made the solid. I decomposed that to a surface and thickened the tubes to 1 mm to pretend I was reverse engineering somebody elses's engine block or valve manifold.
One can make some interesting movie sets and game levels screwing around with blocks and angled tubes.
But, definitely, when one imports a point cloud or a bad mesh file and has to resolve all sorts of hellishly disconnected facets, it would be a godsend to have a mesh-to-surface and mesh cleaning up tool. I hope I never have to deal with meshes again unless there is a competent tool on hand.
The issue I was having with meshes years ago could have been avoided if I'd first modeled my hull in CAD and only used Freeship Plus to validate my desired targets. Splines from CAD instead of yoking around with bad imported meshes that LOOKED good and SHOULD have been good going from Freeship Plus caused me a lot of grief and lost time. Now, i just make a hull in CAD, push and pull control points to get a good shape, then export to VRML and import into FSP the VRML to get my hydros. Vastly faster, less painful, and keeps me more in SLT than the other way around, hehehe.
Anyway, so far, using Purge History has NOT vaporized any more of my geometry. I also have not had any more problems with symbols. But, I've decided my 25-part inclined ladders would be non-symbols -- just in case.
So far, so good.
Now, if only SLT had macros and a teach-learn function to make and save more time.
