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 |
