Chapter 32
Working with Surfaces

With surface modeling, you build a shape face by face. Faces made by surface features can be knit together to enclose a volume, which can become a solid. With solid modeling, you build many faces at once in a single feature to make the volume. In fact, solid modeling is really just highly automated surface modeling. Obviously, there's more detail to it than that, but this definition will get you started.

You can drive a car without knowing how the engine works, but you cannot get the most power possible out of that car by only pressing harder on the gas pedal; you have to get under the hood and make adjustments with an understanding of how it works. In a way, that is what working with surfaces is really all about—getting under the hood and tinkering with the underlying functionality.

The goal of most surface modeling is to finish with a solid. Some surface features make faces that will become faces of the solid, and some surface features only...