Hey there,
not sure, if it just is not meant to be used that way, but i would like to transform a flat disc (2nd degree with 3x3 control points) with the soft edit srf command to shape some kind of bowl. (the other approaches didn’t bring the desired results: sweep, loft)
unfortunately, fixed edges won’t help with the model, since the control points are outside of the shape. i’m sure, that i am just missing something, right? but i don’t know what. 
any help is appreciated. thanks!
Hi George - that is a very hard way to make a bowl - Revolve of a profile curve is the first thing that comes to mind - can you post a file or something indicating the desired shape?
-Pascal
If you REALLY had to do it that way, you could make a revolved disc surface to start - make a line that is radius length long, rebuild it with a certain number of control points for later editing, then revolve the line around its endpoint 360° to make an “editable” disc surface, whose points are all on the surface. Then start pulling surface points vertically… Have fun.
–Mitch
The resulting surface will be degree 2 rational with weights other than 1 in the U (circumferential) direction. This can result in curvature discontinuities across the quadrants if control points are moved. To maintain curvature continuity Rebuild or RebuildUV as a degree 3 surface in the U degree, perhaps with 8 control points. Example attached.BowlDC01.3dm (680.3 KB)
Thank you for your suggestions. Once again I realized how little I know about Rhino and next to nothing about surfaces in general. 
As I can’t upload files yet, here’s what I did in the end:
Since I had the cross-sections of the bowl I just used the sweep1 command with two of the four half sectional lines selected. Gave me a nasty center, but that wasn’t problematic for the object.
But following your suggestions @pascal, I could have just used the revolve command and trimm the bowl to my liking, in this case.
Soft edit just seemed to be such an intuitive way of surface control.
Thanks again.