Patent ID: 7733339

Claim:
A system, comprising: a computer-implemented solid-modeling system, said computer representing a three-dimensional part as a list of analytic bounding surfaces that are trimmed by other analytic bounding surfaces, curves and points to define the geometric representation of the part, said computer providing the list of analytic surfaces as candidate slicing surfaces and being responsive to a command to partition a part along a slicing surface selected from said list by generating a partition including two or more sub-parts including their respective lists of analytic bounding surfaces from the list of analytic bounding surfaces for the part and returning the number of trimmed surfaces in each of the sub-parts; and a computer-implemented slicing tool, said computer (a) commands the solid-modeling system computer to partition the part along a plurality of different candidate slicing surfaces selected from the list, (b) computes at least one quality metric that estimates the number of trimmed surfaces in each sub-part factorial summed over all of the sub-parts for each candidate partition based on the number of trimmed surfaces in the part and sub-parts, (c) selects one candidate partition with a small said at least one quality metric, and repeats steps a, b and c on one or more of the sub-parts and their respective lists of analytic bounding surfaces generated by the solid-modeling system computer to produce a series of simpler sub-parts the union of which is the part that reduce the quality metric until a termination condition is met.