Alan Horkan wrote:

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I'd just like to point out, for the sake of others who might get a wrong idea from you, that Illustrator has no "warping nodes".

Unfortunately your are not correct.

The best I can manage at the moment is to show you this screenshot and try to direct your attention to the very hard to find feature (see the hand with a finger pointing down and beside it a box with a twirl coming out the corner) http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/illustrator/Adobe-Illustrator-CS/A...

(found a better link)

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From the middle to the left, see warp tool, and twirl

http://www.coe.fau.edu/abinder/handouts/Itools.htm

These are taken from Adobe Illustrator CS verison 1

I just went out and fired up a copy of CS2 here at work. Alan, thank you for pointing this out! Finally something neat from illustrator. :-)

This is a bit different than node sculpting. It doesn't require a node selection. There is a cursor with a center mark and an area delimited by a larger circle. As the user clicks and drags the paths are updated in real time. only the area within the larger circle is updated. And the amount of update seems to taper off toward the edge. There are various effects which can be applied to the current path. My take: we could do something like this by partially applying our non existent live effects to a path within an adjustable sphere of influence.

Aaron Spike