19:05 <wpwrak> hmm ... thinking of a designer-time-efficient way to handle clearances between parts in 3D designs. instead of adding outlines at some small distance around things, which is tedious work and leads to cluttered designs, why not design the parts such that they touch each other, generate individual meshes, then ...

19:07 <wpwrak> foreach P in PARTS: P' = P; foreach Q in PARTS: if P != Q: P' = P' - offset(Q, d)

19:07 <wpwrak> where offset() is an offset function for the mesh, something like this: http://homepage.tudelft.nl/h05k3/pubs/TASEOffsetting.pdf

19:08 <wpwrak> and d is the offset distance. though that could be d function that depends on P and Q, on direction, etc.