loft guide perpendicular to plane

jelte_steur814

Hi,

I hardly ever draw a whole part. since most of my products are at least symmetrical over one mirror plane I draw only half, and put a mirror (or multi mirror fs i found yesterday) at the end.
however when working with surfaces, one has to make the surfaces perpendicular to the mirror plane to make that work. now i often sketch a guide, (surface) extrude it perpendicular to the plane and make the loft at that guideline tangent to the newly extruded surface. This is workable but could be more efficient if guides would allow a 'normal to profile' option like the profiles. even better would be if i wouldn't be required to draw the guide and just force the loft perpendicular to a mirror plane but let it sort out the guide itself. but that may be too complicated.

Is anyone else surfacing symmetrical products in half?

dirk_van_der_vaart

Try drawing a construction line and snap the guide to that line

S1mon

While it’s possible to mirror half of a surface like that, I usually model any surfaces which cross the mirror plane as a whole surface. It’s easier to make things continuous. Of course things which don’t cross the mirror plane can be built once and mirrored.

Using the example of a car, the hood, roof, front/rear windshields, and bumpers/grills etc are all built in full, but the side panels, wheel arches, doors, etc are built on one side and mirrored.

Keep in mind that you can mirror sketches or curves or even control points to make all the inputs to a surface symmetric.