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well its very do-able, but it does require a bit of trial and terror. Where exactly are the "logical break points" is a learning experience and AC3D will crash if you try and make a convex surface with "bad vertex's". What a bad vertex is exactly, I'm not sure, but I've ran into them several times :( having a vertex not attached to the object is definitely one of them, and too many vertex's is also an issue, but for the most part, the crash can be avoided.
The convex tool on vertex's is key to this working. the other procedure I use to make things work is what I call "flattening the vertexes" When you grab what you think is say a section of vertex's, you notice that a particular side won't be flat because the vertex's are not in a single plane. You really need to have all the vertex's in a single plane to make a nice "box" cutout.
You want to do this before you make the convex section, but to demonstrate the procedure, I'll do it afterwards to straighten out a boxed section. You really want to do this before you box out the convex section so the mating pairs of sections meet up properly.
1) so in the first pic, you'll see the uneven edge as a result of the vertex's not lined up.
2) switching to vertex mode, and turning on the select through, I grab all the points of the edge. also note that the containing field of all the vertexs is 3 dimensional, not 2 dimensional (all three dimensions have a value, see the red circle.)
3) so here is the "trick" I resize the shape ONLY in the small field, the one that should be zero to make the points lie in a single plane. I keep the exact values for the other two dimensions.
4) once you click on the resize, you have a flat vertical surface for the cut. much easier to unfold and then later build out of paper. 3d software is really not designed for this kind of procedure or else it would do a better job of aligning the vertex's in the first place, but at least you can fix it reasonably easily.
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