Shawn - No booleans, I don't trust them. Then again, it used to freak me out when I'd accidentally move the drawing plane, now I do it all the time on purpose. Maybe it's time I embrace booleans - where applicable.

Mark-
I actually imported the profile of the locomotive frame into the spline modeler (without all the bolt holes - added those later) then converted it to vertex. And, I'm just guessing here, I probably ended up using too many quads (did I say too many? meant to say WAY too many). At a glance, there's only one tri visible in the attached screen capture from the vertex room (just found another).

The model is supposed to be cast and machined steel, I want the bolt holes to be smoothly round so I've got 32 quads per hole right there (I can see a high fidelity spline model helping here). Then I transition the geometry from the hole to the flat plane of the frame side, and next thing you know I'm drowning in quads.

Am I too hung up on quads and tris? I may never send the model to another program, but I do want to use sound modeling techniques, just in case. While I want model efficiency, it is a complex machine, it will be a big model, a big file. I just can't let it get out of hand. I need to explore the spline modeler, I like the fact you can keep a model simple and jack up the fidelity for rendering.

Can you assign shading domains in the spline modeler?

By the way Mark, I go back to RayDream 2.5 (? or 3, can't remember) and went to Carrara when 1 came out (although I probably upgraded 2 or 3 times before I did more than open the program!). I probably learned more after an hour or two of following your VTC tuts as I did in 15 years on my own. Great tuts, thanks!

Anyway, back to work.
Mike