Hi Will,

> Is there a way when drawing a curve to "move it out from the origin in cases like this??

One possibility is to place the first point in the top view away from the origin, then continue drawing in the front view. Your curve will end up planar to the front view but going through the initial point you picked. I do want to add some construction plane manipulation tools for a future version which would probably be more exactly what you need here.


> it usually ends up on the inside of my model (at 0,0), requiring me to then hide my surfaces

Hmmm, normally this shouldn't be a problem that the curve is inside your model. But it looks like you have turned off "Display hidden-line curves" and "Display hidden-line edges". Go to Options / View, and turn those back on (at least the one for curves) and you will be able to select your curve even though it is inside the model. I guess the part that is not explicitly mentioned in that option is that not only does it enable the display, but it is implicit that if it is displayed then it is also selectable. That's one reason why I haven't made it a big priority yet to add a wireframe mode, because hidden-line mode already gives you most of the capabilities of wireframe mode.


> Anyway, lofting a non planar curve unfortunately doesn't cap the ends

Yeah, the problem is with a non-planar curve there isn't really one single well defined surface that can be put there, there are usually different possibilities with different amounts of bulging, etc... Particularly if there are more than 4 curves. With a planar end it is clear what the shape should be.

I suppose it might be reasonable in the case of 3 or 4 curves to do a Network surface as the "cap"...


> I'm wondering if there's anyway to directly shell surfaces like these

Hmmm, I don't think so... Looking at the top view, it looks like your protrusion there is not a constant thickness. I mean that the outside curve has a different curvature than the inside part (as viewed from the top). This generally means that shell won't work for this situation, since it creates things using offset and offset constructs parallel shapes.

Since the outside shape is no longer a sphere surface, you will definitely need to use something like Network to create a new surface out there... Maybe in the future it will be possible for me to add some more options to several of the commands to specify that you're doing a protrusion from a base surface. If there was a way to specify that then it could probably do the boolean stage for you. But it will be a while before I'll be able to work on that.

- Michael