The Design Development Environments chapter in "Digital Design and Manufacturing" discussed common trends among CAD/CAM platforms in dealing with complex geometry. In thorough detail, it reinforced the necessity to plan ahead before you begin to model something. The end product should be considered in every modeling technique that you choose.
A couple of terms that were introduced to me in this reading that I had not yet heard before were "developable" surfaces and "nondevelopable" surfaces. A developable surface is a surface that can be converted into a planar form without cutting or stretching the original surface. On the other hand, a nondevelopable surface is a surface that does require cutting or stretching in order to be flattened. If you intend to eventually output actual cutsheets for a fabricator to cut a nondevelopable surface such as a dome, it might be a good idea to figure out ways in which the surface can be broken down into developable parts. This is just one example of why it is important to acknowledge the end product. I also found the example of the truncated cone piece for a tension-rod to be insightful toward this thought. The variables that could potentially change for the piece are the diameter of the rod and the thickness of the steel plate that it attaches to. With these in mind, the designer must make appropriate decisions about how to model the piece so that the variables are free to change. Extrusion operations might be off-limits, while lofting might prove to the best way to go.
I found the author's ability to refrain from being software-specific compelling. I tend to think that different software platforms perform in different ways. The reading, however, did an excellent job of remaining in a sort of common-ground. Reading about these techniques of modeling, editing, or subdividing showed me that these software developers have, to some degree, formed a set of general rules that work well for 3D modeling. No software has fully-exclusive operations.
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