Join for a line.

peter_hall

Been experimenting with using guide lines for lofting. I found it had to be a single line between the two faces being lofted. So if I wanted to turn angles or move from straight to arc then I had a line made of 4 or 5 sections. Then it seemed to create a loft I had to create a plane and sketch for each point of the guide line. So I feel it would be better for loft if one could join the sections of a line to create one single line entity.
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/8292c53edbc5450b9d94acfa/w/42037c78a52c4560972b85fb/e/ee86c75a04c64603afbe10a0

The link is to my loft experiments, feel free to comment on better methods as I like to learn.

andrew_troup

@peter_hall

I suspect the guide curve problem is one of tangency vs sudden discontinuities of curvature.

If you create a guide curve which is a bunch of entities with sharp corners, a loft will fail, but adding even tiny fillets at each intersection will permit it so succeed : (however in the example shown, there are only two profiles, one at each end, and one guide curve, on the right)

If you need sharp transitions, or multiple profiles, your approach (stacking discrete lofts) is probably the best way at present. In the latter case, you could fillet the discontinuities after lofting, if you wanted to, using fillet features rather than sketch fillets.

peter_hall

@andrew_troup Thanks for the tip on using fillets to prevent sharp corners. Lofting is making me think on plane creations to get guide lines to go where I need them.