2-directional loft with shell

daniel_centore704

Hello!

I'm trying to do a loft operation where:
* Part of the loft is best represented by a loft from the front to back, so it captures the outline of the back plate perfectly:

* Part of the loft is best represented by a loft from top to bottom, because the back plate does not extend all the way to the top of the model and thus cannot be used as a profile beyond that point. I made this loft match the tangent of the first so the curve is fairly smooth between them:

I then did some extrudes and a boolean operation to merge the 2 lofts:


This feels super hacky and I'm interested in a cleaner solution - it seems like ideally this should just be a single loft operation somehow? I couldn't seem to figure out a way to do that unfortunately.

While this solution is hacky, it wouldn't have been the end of the world for me, except that the approach seems to be breaking the shell operation.



So my questions:
* How can I accomplish this loft in a cleaner manner?
* How do I fix the issue with the shell operation?

My workspace:  https://cad.onshape.com/documents/fdbd1b02753809d6d963f4d6/w/2480c22a66c22d0958468a3b/e/8b4a8971c7745b7c5ae53f5f

glen_dewsbury

@daniel_centore704
something like this?
I eliminated some of the profiles in the loft to get smoother transitions. With some thinking and a bit of work you could probably get the number of profiles down to 3 or 4 maybe 5. There are also some changes to the profiles as well that you might want to look at. Apply KIS (keep it simple) Principle when ever possible. Other possibilities available. Maybe extrude neck to end face and loft the body with a blend into neck.
Hope this helps.
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/91468b8b28df16766ab209c3/w/e2a7027d8421dec2dadea475/e/dc9592978c1572b0740916ff

S1mon

A few basic issues:

1. Creating a ton of parallel section curves will pretty much never make a good surface. You need to break things up more the way the surfaces flow, and you want to only have as many curves as absolutely necessary. The body 
2. Don't use the standard spline for anything like this. Use the Bézier tool (under the spline). Your basic curves are not clean and anything downstream will be more challenging. You'll probably want to use 2 or 4 curves to make the outline of the main body.
3. The Y-shape where the body joins the neck is fundamentally hard to do. There are a lot of tricks, but getting that clean is the hardest part.