Hi Burr, yes that's normal - when you use the cutting curve, the surface that is generated from the cutting curve is an extrusion of that curve, using the whole curve. So if you have a long cutting curve then the extrusion generated from it will be just as long.

But if you want to shorten that surface, you can use ShrinkTrimmedSrf to shrink the underlying surface down to the active trim boundaries. ShrinkTrimmedSrf will not currently work on a face selection though, so you can either select the entire object or use Edit > Separate on that face and then run ShrinkTrimmedSrf on it and then rejoin it.

- Michael

Thanks. Will have to pay more attention to cutting objects in the future. I understood the application regarding solids and surfaces, and assumed using curves was less historical...

Hi Burr, why are you worried about it though?

- Michael

Had a problem with doing a Boolean cut on simple beam solids failing... Was looking at the underlying structure of the beams and they were very complex and couldn't figure out why..... Tried a few different things and ended up re-creating them to get the Boolean to work.......

I have a workflow where I use a lot of existing curves from the model to do cuts instead of just making a new simple curve. This can have the adverse affect of having a simple "beam" have a very complex underlying structure... Shrink actually had an adverse effect in making some of the surfaces from it malformed and leaving "underlying surface points" floating way out in space where nothing really belonged....