4. Surfaces

4.1 General

Among the earliest work on CAD/CAM in France were those of Jean-Marc Brun and Michel Théron, researchers at the Orsay faculty around 1965.

Their solution was based on the Boolean combination of solids defined by straight lines and circles. This method did not lend itself well to the description of objects with more varied shapes, such as aircraft, boat hulls, turbine blades, car bodies and so on. This solution is cited here only as a reminder, and the remainder of this study will be limited to parametric solutions.

Industrial applications differ depending on whether they involve fluid dynamics, continuum mechanics, architecture or aesthetics; this alone explains the variety of solutions on offer, some of which have even been...