Lofting/extruding to a point, along a curve?

[djsoundcrafter]

Hi all, fairly new user here. Coming from Sketchup to real big boy tools. I watched the tutorial videos and tried poking around a bit for this specific answer but came up a bit short.

What I'm trying to do is loft a face to a point. Easy enough. I've got my point established on an offset work plane, and I can just loft to that, however, I get nothing but straight lines. (First attachment)

An example of the ideal outcome in SketchUp is the second attachment.

I'm having the most difficulty trying to draw the curves along which I want the face to be lofted because, even as I sketch along my 2D plane, I can't snap the endpoints of my arcs to the endpoints of the face (or the point to which they'll all connect). Can I get some tips as to how to make this happen? File in progress attached.

[JDMather]

Blade Base sketch is not constrained.  You might start here.

http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/SkillsUSA%20University.pdf

Point Plane is not needed.

You do not have a sketch point to loft to.

You do not have any Rails (guide curves).

[JDMather]

Don't look at this till you have gone through the Help>Learning Tools>Tutorials and the pdf I linked previously.

[djsoundcrafter]

What's the key to drawing the guide rails? Since they're perpendicular to the base plane, how can I fix their starting points to it? I didn't seem to find this in tutorials.

[Curtis_Waguespack · Accepted solution]

Hi djsoundcrafter,

You can use the Project Geometry tool to bring geometry in from existing sketches. So if you create a sketch on an origin plane running perpendicular to the base sketch, you can then use Project Geometry to pull in the corner of the base sketch as point from which you can constrain the rail sketches.

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[djsoundcrafter]

Awesome, thanks very much, Curtis, and JD for your useful tutorial!