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Keep profile orientation during a loft
kenn_sebesta167
Member Posts: 101 ✭✭
Sweep provides support for keeping a profile's orientation, and for aerodynamics reasons I would like to accomplish something similar with a loft.
Ideally, this motor mount would have every section aligned with the relative wind, which comes right to left. Whereas as OnShape does it, the profiles twist to basically be normal to the path at every point. This is good enough, but I'd like something better.
Is this doable?
0
Comments
Yes. although not like sweep. With loft you would have to build additional profiles to include in the loft feature
With Loft feature you can provide a Path separately from Guides….
@GregBrown that looks interesting! Do you have a direct link to that document, and I can study it?
Although I have a terrible time with lofts in general. They are very brittle, and tiny changes in a loft frequently— the majority of the time, really— result in breakage downstream, esp. for any other features which depend on the loft. I feel like I still have learning to do here…
@GregBrown, here's my document: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ed242a5f4bfe2609597631f4/w/d3c497e444a49976ad8920b6/e/c5cb29074d9e06784ece1a7e?configuration=List_V3nHLnixArWfvh%3DDefault&renderMode=0&uiState=68656fdf9bef0a2a742a2811
I cannot get guidelines to work at all. If I have a straight-line path in addition to the guidelines I get "Failed to generate intermediate sections." and if I have just the guidelines I get "Could not create loft with given information".
But if I use the same arc for a Path instead of a Guideline, I get a useful output.
You can see why the guideline is necessary, because my lofted shape has to completely encompass the metal mount on the right, and then head off toward the purple motor on the left.
^^^ document is not able to be copied, can you change the permissions to view only, with copy?
Guidelines must intersect sketches. The straight line does not intersect any profile sketches
@GregBrown Done! Apologies for the oversight, I had made a minimal example of an already public document, and hadn't considered that the new document would be private!
Figured it out! @GregBrown was spot on to suggest using the Path as a tool, combined with Guidelines. The problem was a bit deep, but ultimately was due to where my path was only piecewise continuous.
It actually took triangulating as while the system complained about the non-differentiable path with a red dot, the text error message did not give any specific information about that. In the below it mentions several things to check, none of which were the problem signaled in red.
This is the error I get from the same loft, except with both guidelines and path configured. Note how it's even more cryptic.
Of course, once I fixed that, it worked. Here's the resulting pattern, which is perfect.
P.S. @MDesign note that the straight line was a Path, and does not need to intersect all (or even any?) profiles.