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Yes, I could have done 3D carving in one direction anyway. One big issue though is that most of the sections were cut 2" thick because my plan was to cut them from 2" foam. But that was just not practical as the mass was too much for the X-axis stepper motor and the longest bit I could find only could cut through 1 3/4" - so I had to add tabs and cut two 1" thick copies.
In order to do 3D carving I would have had to have had a smoother model (I corrected the roughness manually in DataCAD), and I would have to cut sections every 1" and I would have had to do all the drafting work in SketchUp which would have been very unwieldy. I drafted each and every one of the jigsaw joints in DataCAD, and then copied all the pieces, and then rotated them around to fit onto 2'x8' sheets. That was months of work and I don't know how the 3D entities would have translated back and forth between SketchUp and DataCAD and then back to SU again.
The hardest part of any project, large or small, is the first part - once you get going, then it is one foot ahead of the other...
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