Hi Duke - one thing that's kind of odd in there is you've got one long joined curve that sort of looks like it has branches in it.

A single joined curve is more intended to be a single closed loop that has segments that touch each other one at a time and only end-to-end.

That's actually what you'll have there anyway, but to have a kind of branching-like set of curves joined into one there will be some doubled-back sections.

That's going to cause all kinds of problems if you attempt to use that curve for various tasks... But you must have done the existing surfaces more piece-by-piece than that already.

re: Bulge - the deal with that is that all NURBS surface are made up of a 4-sided patches. If you have a 3-sided thing, that is actually a 4-sided patch with one edge compressed down to a degenerate point.

Which edge is treated as the collapsed one can make for some different shaping with some kinds of surface constructions.

You may want to use a sweep instead of Network when you have a 3 sided piece like that, since that will let you more explicitly control which side is the degenerate one, that is for those 3 sided pieces, select the bottom edge as the sweep profile, and then the 2 longer edges that meet in a point as the rails, and that should give you a much more consistent shaping.


re: thickening - yeah extrude is a one-directional thing, for thickening along a normal, you would normally use Shell instead.

However, MoI's Shell function can not properly handle cases where the various pieces start to self-intersect, like you will have in the fairly sharp corner regions here. The thickening of this piece will need to be done in a more surface-by-surface method. I'll see if I can give you an example.

- Michael