Hi, I’m trying to loft these 3 sketches, using the large curve as a guide. I’ve split the 3 sketches into 2 sides, in order to have the guide be on the outside of the shape.
However when I try to select the guide it tells me that resulting body would not be valid.
What am I doing wrong here?
shapr3d_export_2025-01-30_13h15m.shapr (67.4 KB)
You would need to click on the left one to make the guided loft work.
You just use extrude.
Or sweep instead of loft.
Hey thanks,
The guide is actually aligned to the middle line there.
I can’t use sweep as the thickness of the shape is not uniform.
I’ve attached my file as reference.
After playing around with this some more I’m starting to suspect that I might’ve misunderstood how the loft tool is supposed to be used.
If you wanted the loft with guides to work like your drawing you need guides it all 4 corners.
The guide line should run from sketch to sketch exactly.
This what I would do, use what you have as a guide to create a side sketch with variable thickness you mention.
Trim off from the top and the bottom.
Loft is not the way to go. Do what @SCALEMODEL suggested and use Sweep. Do a secondary step to change the thickness. Here’s one way to do it using Extrude.
Thanks @SCALEMODEL, that makes sense.
I guess the reason I was hoping to be able to loft is that I wanted to able to use the guide to change the shape of the band, while keeping the thickness smooth and dynamic.
Using the side profile as you recommended, did you eyeball that or is there a better way to achieve that?
Say I want the thickness of the band flow like this, from thick at the top to thin at the bottom:
Any tips to achieve that?
Profile.shapr (34.3 KB)
So, I had to use loft while back to create some organic shapes, I wanted to predict what kind of curves the loft would make and what kind of curvature math it’s using. I found out it’s using something like FIT SPLINE, because as you connect curve it changes based on the next connection.
You can eyeball if you want the curve the way you drew above, you drew a curve and put circles as a guide, you would need to now use control spline and eyeball around the desired thickness.
If you don’t want to eyeball it you can use fit spline but that will give you different results which is based on some curve math but will be working around the end point you give it.
So it will look like this.
The other example I used Fit Spline.
