Help with constraints and lofts.
I'm really struggling with constraints.
Nope, you are struggling with constraining a 3d sketch.
Stick to 2d sketches until you can't.
Where is the wing? A wing tip should transition off the wing. Can use it for the dummy bodies I needed.
Usually build the profiles or rails first, so the preceding 2d data can be projected into the current sketch.
I extruded your wingtip band back through the wing rib and trimmed it off.
Traced the canvas with a minimum spline for top and bottom rails. (Yours has way too many spline points.)
Then a sketch plane on each of your upright lines.
Sketch on each plane, project the top, bottom rail point, and the plate, gives you this data in purple.
Snap a spline to the 3 points. Make the spline handles horizontal or vertical as required and adjust the curve to suit. Same for next 2 planes.
Extrude the top rib curve into the wing direction. Extrude a second dummy body for bottom curve. Hide rib sketch.
Create a 3d sketch. Project > Include 3d geometry - select the Leading edge point, each spline point for the tip outline, through to the trailing edge. You get 5 purple points.
Draw a Spline from front, to back snap to the 5 purple points. Top view and make the LE spline handle horizontal/vertical depending on how you look at it.
Adjust the trailing edge handle, until the curve looks good for you.
Before the Loft preparation should look like this, (all black sketch points).
Create Surface Loft.
Select the LE point, profiles from the 3 sketches (in order) and the trailing edge point for Profiles.
Select the top body edge, tip band 3d spline and the bottom body edge, as Rails. Edit the rails to be tangent.
Remove the 3 dummy bodies, and Boundary fill if you want a solid or Thicken for skinned solid.
Step my Timeline, happy to answer questions.
Might help....
Looks like you mostly avoided 3d sketches except for the tip which makes sense I appreciate the help. I also learned that you can loft from a point, never thought of that, but that also makes sense.
As helpful as your reply is, the drawing still has one major issue I can't seem to resolve which is that every time I loft with a profile or a rail I always get an ugly surface where things come to a point.
In this case, if I was to machine/print/whatever this part, I'd have a a weird bump at the top and trailing edge. Also, this part doesn't shell cleanly, I get a partial result. Normally I would use patch to fill in the root, then stitch to make a solid body I can shell, but in this case I can't even create a patch looks like boundary fill is the only way I can find to make it into a solid.
Any ideas on getting a better surface?
Check the curvature combs,
tweaked this handle and is a bit better.
Lofting to a point is worst case scenario, but you could segment the front to a similar Loft you did but seams and more sketching is required.
My example was for prepping a first time Loft, no errors.
Might help...
I rebuilt my model using only one 3d sketch when it was necessary and ran into a lot less issues. Now I'm back to making a decent surface with loft. If loft from face to face on the front and back I get reasonable surfaces and in the middle I can loft between edges and use G2 to get much better surfaces, but between the two types of loft, I get poor edges:
Perhaps someone can help with this last bit. Dave got me on the right path, but now I'm just fighting the surface finish.
@akschu wrote:
Perhaps someone can help with this last bit...
That is the major misconception!
Surface modeling builds on curves or curved edges with "clean" curvature.
The green profile should be the edge of a wing surface, which this will transition into. Where is that surface?
Does the edge of that wing surface have good curvature?
If the curvature of that wing surface isn't OK, you won't build suitable geometry based on it.
