Dammit! I was in the middle of taking screenshots of the intructions when something got messed up in one of the surfaces and I can't find a way to fix is (it's a bug). Some how the normals of the surface apear outside the surface, I thought it was a problem with my video card, but it stays there no matter what I do (not even undo worked). Ans since I'm too lazy to do it al over again, I'll just "type" the detailed instructions intead. Sorry.

Well, here we go.

1.- create you surface, I will refer to this as "surface 1", but you can call it whatever you want.

2.- select surface one and then click "Edit NURBS>Offset Surfaces".

3.- open the attribute edito and it should be displaying the option for the offset that you just did. I will refer to the new surface as "surface 2".

4.- in the attribute editor, under "Offset Surface History" change the "distance" value as you see fit. For me it worked fine with 0.3. The number will be negative or positive depending on where the surface normals are pointing at.

5.- before you continue make sure both surfaces are closed, specially because surface 2 might have a gap somewhere because of the way the surface is offset.

6.- go to the top view and draw a closed curve where you want the surface to be raised.

7.- while still in the top view, select that curve and both surface 1 and surface 2 and then click "Edit NURBS>Project Curve on Surface".

8.- select surface 2 and then click "Edit NURBS>Trim Tool".

9.- the surface will aprea as a white grid now, where the curve that you projected to it will be thicker than the rest, and the area above the curve will have a different looking grid than the area below the curve (this lets you know that the curve is actually separating the surface in two parts).

10.- the way the trim tool works is, you mark with a yellow cube the part of the surface that you want to keep and you do nothing to the part that you want to get rid of. So click somewhere in the top part of the surface (by the way, we are working in persp view now).

11.- hit enter. Now part of the surface should be gone. Make sure you kept the part that you wanted to keep before you continue. If you got the wrong one just click "Edit NURBS>Untrim Surfaces".

12.- repeat steps 8, 9, 10, and 11, except that this time select surface 1, and leave the yellow square on the oposite part of the surface.

13.- now you should have something that looks like the image that I did posted in this post (look bellow this text); except for that yellow edge, I'll explain the yellow in a moment.

14.- if you have trimed the surfaces where they should be trimed and nos have two halves of the surface offset from one another, then it's time to select the trim edge.

15.- hold down the right mouse button over surface 1 until a little menu pops up. From the menu chose "Trim Edge". Now carefully click where the yellow line that I mentioned in step 13 is. So not yours should look like the picture.

16.- repeat step 15 with surface 2, but before you click the edge remmember to hold down "Shift" so that you don't lose the previous selection.

17.- if you have the 2 yellow lines, click "Edit NURBS>Surface Fillet>Freeform Fillet".

18.- with some luck, that did it, and it's the end of it, congratulations. However, you might get a weird twisted surface 3. If that happens then undo the last step (or delete surface 3) and try to change the direcion of the surfaces and try the freeform fillet again. This might take some ingenuity. For example, while attaching the sleves in my parrot pirate for this month's challenge I got the twisted fillet, it after poking arround a bit I realized that the surface for the sleve (which started as a cylinder) had it's begining CV pointing north, while the curve that I projected to the chest had it's first CV pointing south. I solved the problem by simply rotating the curve to match up the sleeve. Deleting history also helps some times.

Good luck with that. And sorry I couldn't get the screen shots like I said I would