Hi Greg, there's no tool that lets you collide one curve into another and deform it...

Normally if you want to have a curve take on some portion of another curve's shape you would just trim them with one another and then join in the actual piece of the other curve you want and then possibly fillet them to smooth out where they connect.


But for a collision type thing you could do something like position the other curve how you want it and then use it as a snapping tool to move control points on to it. That may help for your situation.

Here's an example:



But you can kind of see there with the last point being moved that if you do not have many control points in an area where there are transitions between the deformed area and the original, that you will probably get some bad looking results in those spots.

That's more or less why that kind of collision tool is not normally part of a CAD program's toolset, that kind of a thing based just off of control point manipulation is a kind of approximating thing and does not truly give a 100% exact imprint of the shape, just something that resembles it.

Doing something that actually collides the geometry directly rather than just mushing points around would be quite difficult to implement.... Maybe in the future at some point it could be possible but there would be an awful lot of details to work out especially in transition areas. Kind of gives me a headache just to consider it so that is not a good sign about it being very feasible soon... ;)


EDIT - you might also look into sheet metal design programs to see what they do - it's possible that programs that are specialized in sheet metal design could have some tools similar to that but in general I don't think so - I think that they work more by cutting a surface by an outline, moving the cut piece, and then putting in fillets to connect it to the original body rather than trying to keep it all one surface or all one curve like you're talking about... I myself am not really that familiar with sheet metal design though.

- Michael