Hi Brian,

> There are becoming such a growing list of, well,
> "workarounds" that worry me a bit!

Well, I'd say it is pretty normal for a 1.0 version to not have every single possible thing added into it.

Currently MoI is not oriented towards that kind of surface point squishing modeling. It is possible to do some workarounds if you really really want to use it in that way, but that general style of modeling won't really be a proper fit until I get a chance on enhancing and adding those kinds of tools into the software.

In general that style of modeling has not been a priority for MoI because point squish style modeling tends to be better suited for subdivision surface modelers anyway.

So instead of spending a lot of initial time developing features that are not in MoI's technologically strong area, I instead put a lot more initial effort into things that were more in MoI's strong area, such as booleans between solids and curves, stuff like that.


> (Are these sort of things collated properly somewhere in "helps"?)

Yup, this particular thing is documented inside of Extrude:
http://moi3d.com/1.0/docs/moi_command_reference7.htm#extrude

quote:
"Extrude with Set path has the special property that the output surface will have the exact same control point structure as the curves used to generate it, so sometimes this can be useful if you want to set up a surface and manipulate the surface's control points to deform it."


In general though I haven't put in a lot of effort on tutorials for surface point squishing right now because like I mentioned, MoI does not really currently have the full set of tools to do a proper job of that style of modeling right now.


> Be nice if this could happen in MoI later.

Yup, that is another one of the tools that go along with surface point manipulation type modeling.

I do want to add this stuff in at some point... It's all a matter of priorities, if I had focused on adding this right away then I would not have been able to do something else that is in MoI now.

- Michael