Hi David, so I think in order to get the kind of cut profiles that you want you'd need a shape more like this (also see attached 3DM file):




But this is just not really the way that you'd want to work with things in MoI - you'd want to know before hand that you wanted a shape with a kind of tapering and indentation in it from the beginning rather than trying to start out with a fairly different shape and then try to mutate it to match your end profiles. That's a very sub-d modeling type of process, it's just not what NURBS modeling is really suited for.

I mean it's not like you can't experiment with shapes in MoI, but in a case like you have here it's really a type of organic shape modeling that you're trying to do, with the end result being not a very uniform regularized shape. The more that you get into this type of territory where the thing you want is some kind of result of squashing small zones of the shape around in 3D, the more you leave the territory where NURBS modeling is good at and you go more into the territory where sub-d modeling is good at.

The main difference in these cases is that the profiles you're trying to use do not really fully define the model shape, they're more of a product of some organic shape. It's similar when doing a human face for example - sure a human face has a profile that can be captured at any one particular angle, but that profile alone does not fully define the shape like it does with an extrusion or revolve since the shape changes a whole lot right as you leave that immediate area that the profile happened to capture.

The more the thing you're trying to model fits into that kind of category of "not fundamentally defined by 2D profile curves", the less of a fit that particular thing is for NURBS modeling and the better it fits with sub-d modeling.

- Michael