not quite lofting or sweeping

[roambotics_scott]

I'd almost bet I'm missing something because this seems so obvious but I often find myself wanting to do something like taking two perpendicular cross-sections and building a smooth body.. but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do that starting with something like this

About the best / simplest thing I can do is to split those two cross-sections then loft all around and make a closed body

but I have no control over the tangency so I end up with something like

 

which seems very unnatural.

Even if I don't play with the handles on a spline loop, I get something much more reasonable [cross sectional comparision]

Now I know that I can go through and make a bunch of cross-sections and do traditional lofting but that takes something that feels like it should be doable in 5 minutes and makes a big project of it and it litters the design with construction planes and sketches.

It'd be great just to be able to loft using one cross section along the long axis and then the two perpendicular cross sections as rails but when I try that it tells me that the body would intersect itself.

[Anonymous]

Take advatage of Sculpt. Should take one minute.

[roambotics_scott]

I don't suppose you'd mind pointing me in the right direction - even after watching a few videos, I'm completely lost about how to go about that without a lot of loss of precision or monkeying around.

[roambotics_scott]

Many minutes later and I'm having no luck at all with sculpt for this.

I've tried generating faces and extruding, and I've tried starting with a surface of revolution, adding symmetry, and squishing it but so far nothing is working reasonably.

Manually making faces, extruding, etc seems labor intensive and in the end fell pretty short.

Then when I tried an extrusion, I had to use an absurd number of subdivisions not to try to do an extrusion on this without getting horrible pathologies

manually cutting that out and bridging triggered a hang for nearly 10 minutes (2.6GHz Core i7 w/ 16GB of 1.6GHz DDR3)

When it finally did complete, it (a) broke the internal symmetry in the form, (b) left a gap in the bridgeed faces, and (c) made F360 slow and unstable enough that it hung and crashed when I tried rotating the view.

Perhaps it's just that I never use the sculpt environment but my impression of it so far is that it's not well suited for things other than.. well, scuplting. I can't imagine I'd want to use it to actually design parts that that would fit together.

[Anonymous]

You are trying to hard. Here you go. This is only the third time i have used sculpt. Took me longer to save it and share it then to create it. Start with Create Form, Box, choose plane, sketch rectangle, grab handle and stretch, select symmetry (2X), Ok, edit form...

http://a360.co/1GVwToq

[kb9ydn]

I know what you're looking for.  In Solidworks this would be called a boundary feature (either surface or solid).  It doesn't appear there is an analogous function in Fusion, so probably a T-spline form is the way to go.  Until now I had not ever used T-splines so I decided to give it a go real quick.  It took me about 30 seconds to realize that this is a completely different type of modelling than what I'm used to (typical sketch based solid modelling), and I have no clue how to use it.  And because it's completely foreign, simply messing with it for a few minutes is not going to be enough to figure it out.

So, yeah.  I guess I'm not going to be much help.

C|

[roambotics_scott]

Oh wow that's great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ9Ql4TkTXo

I love the select slider thing too - that'd be an awesome feature.

@Anonymous I can see how you can use that to make something that looks similar, but not that precisely  reproduces the cross-sections. It seems silly to me to have to roughly approximat something that I have the exact curves for.

[colin.smith]

Advanced modeling feature.