When you sweep a cross section in the vertex modeler, does it sweep from the midpoint of the cross section, or can you specify the "hot point" from which it sweeps? This is important to me, because I have a "measurement-sensitive" model I'm constructing. thanks!

For that level of precision, I use the spline modeler with cross sections imported from Illustrator. You can get closer tolerances and still have editablility. If you need a vertex object, you can then convert the spline object later. The other option is to use Amapi if you've got it - a great tool for precision work too.

That's the modeler I started with, but the cross section distorted horribly along the lengths. So that's why I moved it into the vertex modeler.

Were you doing a pipline extrusion? If the cross section is not centered in the plane, you'll get some whacked shapes.

yes, I was... and no, the cross section wasn't centered in the plane. See, I know the dimensions the sweep path would describe, so I set the bounding box to that size, to make it easier to draw that path. Then I slid the cross section to one side, and used that as my starting point to draw the path. Sounds like this is a no-no.