Hi Brian, here is another example to show you what happens in the case when you've got a tight bend in a curve and you ask for an offset distance greater than the curvature of the bend:



This tends to be easier to understand when you see it happening in small steps. Here are a sequence of 6 different offsets, each one slightly larger in size.

You can see that the first 3 everything is pretty simple, the distance involved is less than the curvature of the bendy part.

But after that you can see that portions of the offsets from either side of the bend start to overlap one another - this makes that kind of "curly cue" situation that I was describing previously (the results shown here were with the Trim option turned off). If there are a large number of these, it is not unusual for the offseter to get confused about which parts are the "main" parts and which parts are the loop parts to throw out, that's what happens when you get a small result curve from a complex offset. But you can turn off Trim to get back some raw results that you can then edit by manual trimming to get the final result.

You might experiment more with offset initially using the "Through pt" mode instead of a specific distance, the through point mode makes it easier to see how the offset shape changes as you move gradually away from the curve in small steps.

- Michael