[cthalupa]

This article is pretty disingenuous in the parts where it focuses on topology. CAD files are imported all the time into CG software with awful topology - looking very similar to that mess.

There's lots of software and tooling, automated and otherwise, to significantly improve topology. This is a very common problem in this space and not acknowledging that is silly. It's not perfect, and remodeling things is indeed a common solution - but retopo addons and software are big business because they're good enough for a whole lot of use cases.

[dubbie99]

The thing is CAD models look perfect. They are completely un-editable in that state however. You have to go back to the cad program to make edits to the original solid model.

[cthalupa]

> The thing is CAD models look perfect.

No they don't. I am explicitly saying they often have the exact topology issues that are showcased here. They don't have some of the other issues - but a huge chunk of this article is about bad topology. I have imported hundreds of step files into CG software that have absolutely horrific topology, because one cares about producing real things and the other is about CG modeling.

> They are completely un-editable in that state however.

This is also untrue. I do plenty of hard surface modeling work on imported step files. Including the retopology I've talked about.

> You have to go back to the cad program to make edits to the original solid model.

If you need to modify it for production, yeah? But the whole use case here seems to be ecommerce website uses. In which case you can 100% take a cad file you've imported and modify it (if you managed to get a good topo out of it) for visual/aesthetic stuff.

(Some CAD software actually does a good job exporting - I have a moi3d license specifically because it has way better exports topology wise than solidworks or fusion. I build shit in solidworks and send it to moi before opening it in blender or houdini to do any render work)