Hi,

I'm having a senior moment here.

I'm trying to scale say a rounded rectangle so it scales evenly in all directions.
So in this example I want to fit a rounded rectangle within another so there's even spacing all around


Please be gently :)





Steve

That is not actually something that is well suited for a scale workflow. For scale to be able to work like that you'd have to scale a different amount on different axis.

But, there is another tool that will work well, namely "Offset"

Select the outline of your rounded rectangle, then select offset, and enter an amount. I do believe that will do what you want.

oh great

Thanks for the response

Hi Stever_uk,

You can also do this by selecting the first button "Scale" under the Transforms section.
That will produce a 3D Scale.
Just make sure that you've centred your first selection point within the very centre of your object to be scaled.
Usually I'll do this selection in the 3D view & then swap back to the Top view to do the next selection point.

HTH, Colin

Hi Stever - yeah like Linker says above you probably want to use Offset for that kind of thing, that's for creating a shape that is a constant distance away from an existing one.

It will also make a result that can be larger or smaller than the original one, so I know it seems like it's a lot like scaling, but scaling and offsetting are actually pretty different operations.

Basically scaling produces an exact copy of an object at a different size, but if you want a shape that has a constant thickness away from an existing one, except for in special cases that new object is actually going to be a somewhat different shape than the original curve, it won't be an exact copy except in some cases like with a circle or a square.

That's the part that is kind of tricky, because if you think of how to produce a circle that is a constant distance away from an existing circle, scaling does actually work in that case, but that's because the circle is a particular shape that has a uniform symmetry around a single point. Other shapes that don't have that kind of complete symmetry to them won't produce the same result with scale or offset.

See these previous threads for some more discussion on this and some visual examples:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1939.20
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=774.16
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1833.1

- Michael

Great,

Thanks for the explanation
Stevd