Why can't I offset my surfaces?

[eobet]

I can open a new document and offset any surface, no problem.

But today I spent a few hours (!) perfecting two surfaces and for some reason, any offset I create becomes a 0 offset surface, even though the preview animates properly and shows an offset surface at a distance.

Please try to open the attached file and tell me if you can offset any of these two surfaces or not?

Thank you!

PS. When I try various different inputs and combinations with the offset tool, Alias actually crashes.

EDIT: What is this? I'm trying to attach a 22kb zip file of my wire and I get "

Please correct the highlighted errors and try again. The attachment's content type (binary/octet-stream) does not match its file extension."

EDIT 2: Now the page is saying "Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body. The invalid HTML has been removed. Please review the message and submit the message when you are satisfied." This is hilariously pathetic. What is going on?

[eobet]

Still can't add... try this instead:

https://mega.co.nz/#!2EF3VB7C!IaDXgDNVA_LHSrItAGawbArEGHcVqOx-hgqxChVg1fw

(Interesting that I had to type in that site myself... Google did not show it, I had to remember the exact address.)

[JohnDixon8251]

Offset does not like that at the end of your surface you have 6 cvs piled on top of each other. If you detach the tiniest little corner of your surface it will offset fine. In general, if you can stay away from 3 sided surfaces (not that offset will not work with 3 sided surfaces) things will work out better. Some other systems will not accept 3 sided surfaces if you ever try to output to them.

[eobet]

Wow, thank you for the information!

But aren't you then also saying that Alias can't offset revolved surfaces? (Because that is how that surface was shaped. I did not put those vertices in the same position, Alias did that on its own when I did a revolve.)

What a huge limitation in that case!

[JohnDixon8251]

I spent some time with your file and recreating similar situations and the answer is rather strange. You can definitely offset a revolve, including ones that have points on the center of rotation and that have the first 2 points perpendicular to the axis (as you have it, making the surface tangent across the centerline) but how close to the axis of rotation that second point is is the problem. I do not see a logical reason but as long as the second point is far enough away from the first point, the offset works fine, make the surface too pointy and the offset fails. It is strange and I may look at it further, there may be a tolerance issue involved or something.