Hi Michael, Thanks for your time!

So the metallic lighting option would help best for surface inspection?

"It will be particularly difficult to shell or offset surfaces that have tightly bent areas in them where you try to use a thickness that is greater than the radius of curvature in those areas."

This explains a lot! Are there any software capable of measuring minimum curvature in lofts or splines? I know where this occurs in the lofted part and I might be able to get rid of this problem by moving the control points in the 3d splines. Might speed up the process if I could quickly obtain minimum curvature. If only it were possible to keep the curvature in a spline larger than the required shell this problem might be dodged then?

I have to say that MoI have a higher success rate in shelling than GMD! But GMD have an alternative way to shell. The one in MoI are similar to the "Thicken" command in GMD's surfacing tab. Offsetting the surface perpendicular to the selected one (which I like to think of as the organic way), and then the "shell" command where you select faces of a solid and the shell is, what I like to think as, done mechanically. This way is better to me since you dont have overlapping geometry when you do a shell on individual lofts and assemble or unite them later.

This shelling is very important to me. I had to make copies of the lofts and scale them down and boolean subtract them from the original to "shell" this body. This only made the lofts hollow. Then had to trim away excessive planar geometry. In this situation it might have been really great if you could scale down a part respective to the XYZ axis. Are there any such way in MoI? Manipulating the bounding box of a whole body..?

Thank you very much.

Elrick