Hi Group,

See attached model & curves. What orientation does MoI need the curves to be in
so that it will build a solid like the one to the right please ?

TIA,
Paul

Just add a second closed curve (ellipse(?) as "external circle" and make a sweep with 2 rails ;)
Seems you must change a little the bottom profil if you want exactly that you show on your example

Hi Pilou,

Thanks, but why doesnt Sweep 1 work in this case ?

TIA,

I don't want say some stupidities so wait the Michael's answer ;)
In general all works better with 2 rails and you have more control of the complex forms
Better if the 2 rails have same numbers of control points

Hi Paul and Pilou,
I found that, not only in MoI, as long as the circle (rail) is touching one of the profiles it will sweep to the solid you wanted using 1 rail.
Technical reason, no idea. As a guess, not even going to attempt it.............Mr Wizaaard!!

~Danny~

Not sure :)
I remember that! :=)
Sweeping is automatic!!!
So I suppose that the exemple of the first post will work if you put forms like this :)
boxes must be not overlaped!

Hi Paul, this is the "auto-place" mode kicking in when you don't want it to.

If you have the profile curves for a sweep positioned away from the rail curve (specifically if they are outside of the bounding box around the rail), then auto place mode will kick in.

This is to allow for drawing shapes on a plane and having them moved and rotated automatically into place on the rail, like in the example that Pilou shows above.

You can also have multiple profiles for auto-place mode if they are all on the same plane, see here for another example. MoI is interpreting your curves in the same way.

To make your example work the way you want, you will need to make your circle slightly larger, so that it is touching or going through the profile curves instead - you can do this by scaling it up slightly from its center point. That will cause MoI to use the profiles exactly from their current positions instead.

I have been meaning to add some UI widget for controlling auto-place mode more explicitly, that's something that I am going to be looking into for v2 when I get a chance to do a batch of sweep related stuff.

Maybe I can also improve the automatic "auto-place" mode detection to turn it off when your profiles are on opposite sides of the bounding box like in your case here.

But a slightly larger circle rail will fix it up for you now.

- Michael

Thanks Danny, Pilou, Michael

Michael: I was so close wasn't I to being just inside the bounding box...ha!

Detection of instances like this should help I think....if you use just the horse shoe profile and the rail it actually orients that curve
incorrectly 90deg opposed.

Thanks again guys for the great help!

Rgds,