Mike Crossmire

I've been using XP with IronCAD very successfully since getting my new P4. I *have* had the disappearing toolbars problem come up a few times: 1)the trial version of Inovate did it from the beginning 2)IronCAD has done it on a couple occasions, but only when I did something involving adding or changing Catalog files. Not sure if this was the real reason, though. I figured it was the .tbc file, so fixing it was no problem. IronCAD is still one of the few programs that gives me a little tingle of joy to use, though. I find myself muttering "this program rules" quite often...

I think I've partially solved the mystery. It looks as if the way UV coordinates are set up on the original IronCAD part affect the way MAX tries to resolve things when it imports. I can make the vertices on the blend match properly just by making sure that the blends and the nearby faces all share the same mapping projection. Now, the UV's should actually have no impact on the vertices, but somehow that or the way smooth groups are assigned affects the tesselation in MAX. I will send you the test scene so your development guys can experiment with it further.

The particular blended edge I am using is on the curved sides of a capped block, so that may be where the confusion comes from. The item I was modelling was a Romanesque-style column. I'd be happy to send you the scene file and 3DS file--just tell me where to email it.

I'm still having problems with exporting parts with blended edges to 3DS format. What usually happens is that the blend edges don't match up/weld properly with the nearby faces. The last I heard, this was an ACIS bug (it's been happening for the past few IC versions), but at least inside IronCAD, blended edges always render perfectly. Does IronCAD use an ACIS function to export to 3DS, or do they use their own? I need to export in 3DS because our other tools are in MAX 4.2, and 3DS format is the only one which exports the bitmaps and UVs properly. Thanks.

I am an IronCAD user, but when Inovate came out I saw it as a possible solution to our company's needs for an easier architectural modeller. IronCAD is overkill for most of the work we do at a game development house, and Inovate's price was low enough to make getting it for several people here very attractive. The big stumbling block for me is the fact that Inovate contains NO surface reshaping capabilities at the Intellishape level. Without the Taper/Cap/Bevel/Shell functions, it's just not powerful enough. I think these features could be enabled at the Intellishape level without giving away the store feature-wise compared to IronCAD, which still has drawing, sheet metal, and other hard-core functions. Does anyone here have feedback on how they've used it so far?