i use spatch and did the fuselage of my xwing model in it.  if you look
at the nose i did, you'll see that i built the cutout into the model. 
for the rear of the fuselage, however, i converted it to a solid mesh
and then did the cutouts with csg.  in my original fuselage, all of the
cutouts were csg, but they created holes.  so in my second version, i
built in as many cutouts as i felt would be prudent.  so let's take the
nosecone as an example.  i already had the thing made, in particular,
the main center sweep and so i had to figure out how to make the
cutout.  first step was deleting the patches in the area to be worked
on.  this actually deleted more than i needed because it left other
patches lacking nodes.  so next i filled in the areas affected by this
and built the sweep back up to the point where there was a hole where
the cutout was supposed to go.  then i added the cutout.  somethimes, i
would have three or four nodes, but no patch would emerge.  when that
would happen, i would just subdivide what i thought the patch should be;
usually just making a straight line run from one side to the other. 
this would usually generate two three point patches and solve the
problem.  i'm sorry this is kind of hard to follow.  if you think it
would help, i could email you my fuselage spatch file.  oh, one last
thing, use layers extensively.  if you need nodes to line up put not
affect each other, that's the best way to do it (two layers).

TigerHawk wrote:
> 
> I am haivng trouble trying to figure things out with these type of
> modelers. Here is the problem I am having (or rather what I would like
> to see happen):
> 
> The thing the discouraged me from sPatch was that you couldn't fuse
> points onto an already created circle. Since loops are supposed to be of
> 3 OR 4 points, if you had a 3 point loop, adding another point seems
> fine, but it doesn't appear to be possible. The reaosn I need this is
> because I like to start simply and work up to complexity. For example,
> if I were to create say a face, or rather a head, I would start with
> what an artist (well an artist using paper :) would probably do - that
> is make the outline of the head (verticle and horizontal loops). The
> problem is that I can't seem to add lines and loops to those loops. I
> thought HammaPatch might help, but, unforatunately, it seems to be
> pretty much beta right now (it runs SSSLLLOOOWW on my machine :( and is
> unstable)
> 
> Any help would be very apreciative. I was hoping to find a program that
> could do organic surfaces not only for Pov-Ray but for other exports as
> well (for use in say a Scene Demo for objects).
> 
> Happy Tracing,
> 
> Tim Soderstrom
> TigerHawk

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