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Loft, thicken and mirroring problems
tyler_geiger873
Member Posts: 8 ✭
So this is my like 3 post because this is my first major project and i've been working on it for months and am about to give up, so basically I've been working on this underwater drone and I tried lofting but it didn't work too well and wouldn't follow the path I wanted it too and when I tried to add guids onshape said they don't intersect the profiles or something like that even though they are so to try to fix this I added more profiles for it too follow which worked sort of but it wasn't perfect, but I moved on (if you know how to fix this please let me know) after I moved on I went to go thicken the part to around 3mm or so but it would fail and would only work with 1mm, I tried deleting sketches and adding them, moving them, ect but didn't work, the only time it would was when I had the loft use tangent to profile which worked but it would cause the loft to also flow right where I didn't want it to go. so I tried different things but none worked so I moved on just to test to see if I could mirror the part with it being 1mm and that failed too, I have no idea why and am at a loss please help
link;https://cad.onshape.com/documents/2e559d51465c960ecc2071ec/w/18a8db6e194f3f7a1ee57f69/e/f8944e8860685539cc359774?renderMode=0&uiState=6852d0cea326c817fa95a634
Comments
My first thought is that you have way too many profiles in your loft and that is going to cause some "wrinkles" in your surface that will prevent thickening.
You are also trying to do too much in just one loft. Try creating different "sections" separately
I would suggest looking at some surfacing tutorials like these:
Before giving up. Have you gone through the Onshape tutorials and learning pathways for surfacing? If not you might find the concepts you learn there to be invaluable to figuring out where your stumbling points are.
for the mirror to work well and look good, your profile's have to be normal to the mirror plane. both in each sketch, as well as the surfaces in the loft.
moreover, bad input curvature will also result in ugly surfaces.
In this example, I fixed sketch 2 profile, but not the sketch1 profile. area's like these will create ripples and kinks in the surfaces that are ugly, not very aerodynamic and hard to thicken.
It still contains 3 sided surface lofts at the tip and end which is not best practice (4 sided is best practice), but they work for now…
it's also only tangent, not curvature continuous on the transitions in the lofts. but it gives you a general idea of how to approach it with less sketches, less control, better output