TIG gets the points! I just didn't know what the sketchup word for this was. I will be using his plugin I think, as I want to call it from code (which you can't with native offset) and some of my shapes are a bit crazy.

Thanks to you both for your help!

Hi all,

Not sure if this is a noob question or not, but I guess this is the right place for it.

I'm generating some irregularly shaped faces for a project, and i'd like to "grow" them, by which I mean extend them in every direction evenly, so that the face is larger in every direction by a specified amount, but remains in the same plane.

It's difficult to explain this clearly, so I did a quick MS paint job, attached. The red shape would be the original face, the blue shape would be the new face, extended in every direction by the same amount, but coplanar with the original face.

Any ideas? I think I could write some ruby to do this, but it would be HARD to get right, particularly when you have concave corners and the "grow" amount is greater than the distance between vertices - you have to detect edge crossing. I don't want to have to try if someone else has already done it.

Thanks for any help,

Phil