Good evening, as my title implies, I’m trying to create a realistic model of an existing fuel line (for the purposes of running CFD simulations). I have tried lofting and sweeping.
I’ve seen videos where a spline is drawn, then swept from a face, but I believe that was done in the same plane. My planes aren’t parallel or perpendicular. I’m attaching a SS of my last attempt, where I tried to copy/move a pile of circles and loft/sweep between them. I’ve fought this until I’m crosseyed; feel like I’m overlooking a simple trick!!!
I’ve probably spent 100 hours on the rest of this model (isolated right now), and have been able to figure things out…but this one is whipping me!!!
What you did looks right for Loft tool. When you loft from one circle to next what happens?
It does this (attached image). It doesn’t show an error message. I’m really confused about selecting faces vs “sketches,” and may be doing this wrong. I did get it to loft, once, but only connected most of the sections (it left a gap between the tank and pipe; the tank is on the right side of the image).
Actually, I have to select a face and circle for the loft tool to appear. If I only select circles it stays hidden. Even so, it will often appear, and I will get the result in the last image…which is nothing. I know it’s something I’m doing wrong, just not sure what.
Ok you’re trying to loft from a tube to the circle. Loft tool doesn’t know how to transform from a tube to circle. So I would make end of your tube a solid cylinder, now all the circles should loft.
After your loft is complete shell it so that it turns from solid to a tube. And after you shell one the other side is blocked so add the face of the other side to make it open tube.
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And here’s a slight variation.
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Thank You!!! I added a construction plane .010 off the face of the tank inlet, and sketched a solid circle, but it still didn’t work. Then I remembered reading that somewhere that “order of operations” matters, so I selected the loft tool, THEN the series of solid circles, and it worked! It’s not a 100% perfect silicone tube, but it’s very very close. Thanks again for the help!
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I obviously have a lot to learn. That was very enlightening. I am going to practice that approach. This may be a very elementary question, but how could you measure the geometry between the 2 points, then use your sweep approach? Your swept tube is a lot higher quality than the one I lofted.
I have struggled quite a bit measuring between things in Shapr. I know it’s because of the way I’m setting up construction geometry, just don’t have a feel for it yet.
Thanks for the advice and demo!
Here’s an example. I selected both beginning and ending circle edges. Note at the bottom lower right of the screen there are measurements- deltaX, Y, and Z (shown just before the transition). It gets a little more complicated when the two pipes are at different angles to each other but still doable.
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