Hi Colin,

> Aside from Sweep, I'd of thought that even a simple
> Network would produce similar results?

There are several kinds of cases where they can be very similar.

But they go about generating the surface in different ways.

Network kind of treats all the curves more equally - it's sort of like lofting in each direction and combining/averaging those into a single surface. The result is somewhat more equally influenced by all the curves combining together.

Sweep on the other hand actually slides the profiles along the rail curves, so there's kind of a more "rigidity" about the profile shapes since the profiles actually march along the rails in steps (while simultaneously morphing from one shape to another when there are multiple profiles).


Here's an example where you can see the difference a bit more:



Here's Network on it:



And here's a sweep (short pieces as profiles, long ones as rails):




Here you can get a bit of the feel that Network is somewhat more like a kind of membrane stretched between those curves (not totally but somewhat more like that), while with sweep the profile shape remains stronger since it is the piece that is more directly being copied and rotated around.

Of course also a big difference is that you can have a larger number of curves for Network.

- Michael