Solid modeling with precise NURBS boundaries compliant with STEP standard representsthe most promising way of designing complicated mechanical products in a CIM environment. In paral-lel to the traditional approach of putting together volumetric primitives with Boolean operations, an al-ternative way of applying the wireframe and skinning techniques is under development. The latter ap-proach is easy to implement, robust and capable of handling the most sophisticated models, while suf-fers the drawbacks of low efficiency in identifying interactively the boundaries of each surface patchwhen the line segments are interlaced and located close to each other. This paper describes the essentialsof the wireframe and skinning techniques which produce the identical product information model as asolid modeler.
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