Originally Posted by: zumer 
....Alibre has the capacity to replace surfaces on objects with others, like VC itself,....
Say, I'm curious to know whether or not it can "clean up" or reduce control points in meshes or surfaces, or turn VC/Shark meshes into cleaner surfaces, with less manual stitching of facets or joining of exploded curve segments.
For certain tight areas, I convert meshes to surfaces, and then the surfaces to curves, then delete the intervening curves and use the outside curves. I join them and then turn those into interpolated splines, then build a surface from them. I have to to this since my imported model (from PolyCAD or from Freeship Plus) gets turned into meshes. They look BEAUTIFUL often as they are, but pretty much all I can do with those meshes, which faithfully represent my model, is to draw lines from them or to them. But, they don't respond as boundaries for cutting or limiting other geometry. Lamentable, since I have hours and hours of work anytime I have to destroy or reshape a parent mesh. I don't like decomposing a good smooth mesh (at highest quality from Freeship) only to have it turn into 14,258 somesuch facets, any one of which could form slightly "off" and wreck my long-stretch sessions.
But, fortunately, in Freeship, I can create bspline surfaces and use bspline curves and replace any extremely-point-loaded curves with a bspline curve of least squares (?) and make a surface of 4 to 8 points. It just is tedious and risks some translation issues if the work is too compound or complex.
