What is Surface Modeling? At the core the tools for surface modeling and solid modeling are the same or very similar. The main difference is that a surface is infinitely thin and offers up the ability to work on a single face at a time, rather than an entire shape. This gives us the flexibility to focus on complex geometry on a smaller section of a design.

Surface modeling is also common when working on injection molded designs. Often times you need to work on a single face or set of faces to ensure they can be molded. Surface modeling lets us do this after a solid model has been created.

In this lesson we are just going to take a basic look at surface modeling and the tools used.