Brady,
Again I thank you for being so generous with your time and knowledge. This is exactly what I needed to know, boiled down to a couple of paragraphs. I spent hours rummaging around in the TSB and Vectric forums without stumbling across this info.
.3DM = novelty import format... huh! I've been a Rhino user since ver 2, so I've come to think of it as mainstream.
I had not heard of voxels. I'm curious about what advantages they might have over NURBS or meshes for CAD/CAM. Should make for some good late night reading.
I will check out Aspire. I haven't got a lot of time invested in VCarve, yet, so it might make sense to upgrade now.
Cheers,
Joel