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The machining of sculptured surfaces with the numerically controlled (NC) machines is a common practice in recent auto industry. Manufacturing of dies for the automotive body panels requires many complex surfaces to be machined within a given tolerance. Although various methods have been proposed by many authors, the basic concepts of current machining algorithms can be divided into two distinct categories, i.e., the surface-based method and the point-based method. While the former uses the parametric surface equations to get the machining tool path, the latter, on the other hand, discretizes the surface information into point data, and then calculates the tool path based on the resulting discretized point information. In this paper, the theoretical backgrounds of the two different approaches are presented.