Hi geoff,
> 1. When I select my circle (Frame Cutter Profiles layer) and then the frame curve
> on the same layer to sweep, I'm getting overlapping sweeps instead of a single sweep.
This is because the sweep rail is twisting and banking around in 3D space rather than being a planar curve. It's difficult for the sweep mitering mechanism to produce a clean miter intersection on swoopy 3D bending rails, it works best on 2D planar rails.
Do you need there to be a sharp corner in the shape right at that spot? It will be easier for sweep if the rail is made up of smooth pieces rather than having sharp corners in it - at smooth pieces sweep segments naturally meet up and it's only at sharp corners that things end up as separate pieces. With sharp corners the sweeper tries to extend the sweep pieces past each other and then cut off the extended ends to make mitered corners but the intersection between pieces becomes difficult with 3D swoopy shapes.
If you cut away a bit of space around the sharp corner and put in a blend curve there, that will make a smooth curve that should then also make a smooth sweep along it as well, will that work for you?
> 2. I thought maybe I could make this work anyway since the two sweep objects intersected,
> so I selected my geometry from the frame base layer and then did a boolean subtract on the first/top sweep.
> It worked but left a bit of an artifact.
The intersection between 2 surfaces that meet at a shallow angle can be difficult to calculate. It seems that in this case the intersector is not quite getting a proper closed curve, you can see this if you select the pieces and run Construct > Curve > Isect to generate the intersection results as curves, it's doing something wrong in the seam area.
It tends to be difficult in general to get clean intersections between things that sort of barely graze each other.
Another approach would be to cut each piece to some kind of larger object like a sphere drawn in there, then do a surface blend between the pieces to connect them up.
> Oh, also, is there a way to cut or copy and paste curves that aren't on a layer to an existing layer?
After you do a paste, the newly pasted in objects will be selected so you can set their style right then to place them on the layer you want. You can set the style of the current selection by left-clicking on the color swatch of a style in the Scene Browser, or by using the menu that pops down from the properties panel in the upper right area that shows the information about the current selection.
Let me know if you are still stuck with finishing the sweep.
- Michael
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