Christian Froeschlin wrote:
> Jim Charter wrote:
> 
>> little script in Python. The method is obviously tedious, of course, 
>> when it comes to manually selecting and exporting some 53 different 
>> paths from Wings.  (And I am still not finished, the interior 
>> stitching of the toe webbing is yet to be done.)
> 
> 
> Great result, but it sounds like a maintenance nightmare ;)
At least a serious workflow consideration.  But with mesh modelling, 
workflow, meaning the order of steps, is always crucial.  There is very 
little ability to go backwards.  Best to save many copies of your work 
so that you can return to some point and redirect your strategy from 
there. So yes, maintenance in the broad sense is something you must 
always treat with care in the mesh world.  For instance I have yet to 
come up with a dependable nomenclature for tracking all the various 
branchings my models take.


> 
> Did you consider the reverse approach, i.e. defining or modelling
> the splines and generating leather bands using a macro or similar?
> You'd probably need a second spline for the "orientation". Come to
> think of it, does anybody know of a tool for modelling 3D splines?

Most advanced tools I believe would do that.  Perhaps Silo, not sure 
about Blender, Rhino, one would think, certainly the professional tools. 
  It is a limitation of Wings that you can only export polys.  But 
really, that can be worked around with the Python scripts, which once 
written, make it easy.  The tedium comes with the manual nature of the 
export.  But that would be similar even if you could build and export 
paths as splines or even sequences of verts.  The work comes really from 
the amount of detail in the subject itself.

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