Hi Michael,

Yes I can understand having a realtime feedback for this kind of tool require much more power computing that simple polys.

About the offset :

I get the circle offset position before the sweep, however it only works for ground plane, but not when the driving curve has to touch different object, like the first image sequence I post, or for the little example here :



>> Offset from surface while drawing - one way you can possibly do that now is to drag out a construction line on the surface normal before you place the point. You may need to do a little slight of hand to type in the distance before you finish the construction line to place the end at the distance you want.

I see the idea, and I just try it right now, not very easy :S Probably a solution if I have a unique wire/tube in my model, but I can't imagine placing thousand of wire like that. More over it's also hard to edit the curve afterward (and keeping the offset of course)

>> A kind of "running offset distance" is an interesting idea but may be somewhat difficult to set up, a surface normal has 2 directions on it and it may be difficult for you to predict which is the "positive" side on any given free-standing surface. So just setting a single value and then doing single pick, pick, pick after that probably would not do it properly, you would need to do something like 2 picks with the second pick indicating which side... Might be rather awkward to set up.

Well even 2 click doesnt sounds that bad, I'm quite ease with the MoI navigation so I'm not that affraid by the awkwardness.
Just wondering too, isn't this double normal problem resolved when you works with solids ? It's a bit like the meshing process right, when a geometry is closed you can define where the normal is looking at. (Just a non pragramming lazy guy shorcut :))