Lofted organic ring

David_Kirshoff

I am modeling a housing for something. It needs to be an organic shaped "ring", and i am using lofted profiles to achieve this effect. The problem that I am having is getting the last profile to connect to the first - since they are the same profile, when I click the first profile a second time it disappears from the loft settings. Hopefully that makes sense.

I've tried to do a separate loft to connect the space, using the circles as guides, but the connection to the adjacent profiles is not smooth since they are not part of the same lofted movement..

This is the model.

Thank you in advance!!

S1mon

Use a circle (or other closed curve) as a guide. This will cause loft to make the surface periodic (the last profile will loft back into the first, without re-selecting it).

eric_pesty

I was going to say use "normal to profile" on the end conditions and either duplicate the profile (which you already did with sketch 15) or do a second loft to bridge the gap but set its end conditions to "curvature" for a smooth transitions.

However @S1mon has the better answer, I didn't know that was what it took to make a closed loft!

S1mon

I'm not even sure where I learned that trick to get a closed loft. There's some references to closed lofts in the forum. I couldn't find it in the help - it should really be there. It is in the Featurescript documentation for OpLoft:

 

David_Kirshoff

Wow thanks guys - so simple.