Problem lofting

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I'm trying to loft what I think must be a very easy loft shape and getting 'could not build this loft - non-manifold solid'. Essentially I want to take two (unequal) 'sausage shapes' at right angles and loft them into a bowed disk (or maybe corpuscle) shape. Attached are the sausage shapes - two parallel arcs with half-ellipses on the end - see Capture1.jpg. Capture2.jpg is the loft problem. The non-manifold confusion seems to be around the central axis. Any ideas? Excuse the rest of the crud on the capture.

TIA,

Alan

[sam_m]

try lofting around the perimeter with 3 (would be 4 but same one for start and end, with "closed loop" selected) sketches at 90degrees - so it's like a rotation around a central axis.

or split it into a few operations:

1) create a disk for the top region

2) create a dish for the bottom region

3) loft with tangents from the edges of both middle-patches.

By selecting two sketches which intersect (as capture2) i think it results in a self-intersection and a mess of confusion for the software - basically it wants all parts of the loft to continue on a path without crossing itself.  What you've got is the right side rotates 1 way around 90 degrees but the other side of the same sketch rotates the opposite direction and thus, i think it gets confused as the loft surface twists and intersects on the centreline.  It might work better with 2014 as that supports self-intersections (i think), but no guarantee.

[Anonymous]

OK understand - will give the first a try.

Many Thanks, Alan