How do I perform this loft?

[Anonymous]

Good morning,

I'll start by saying that while I have some experience with Solidworks, I am only just getting started with Fusion 360. I have noticed a lot of similarities between the programs, which has helped a great deal but for some reason I'm having a hard time performing a loft.

I have inserted 2 canvases and used them to generate 3 splines on 3 offset planes. I then launch the loft command but can't seem to get much farther. I seem to remember that in Solidworks I could just select the 3 splines and generate a loft between them fairly quickly. However, in Fusion 360, it won't let me select any of my splines as my profiles, it will only let me select individual points from my splines but that doesn't allow for a loft... am I doing something wrong??

[James.Youmatz]

Hi @Anonymous,

Welcome to the Fusion 360 Community!

I think the issue has something to do with your sketch profiles not being closed. When a sketch profile is closed in Fusion 360, it will generate an orange color inbetween to signify it is now a profile. I don't see that on your model, so I'm assuming that your splines did not close completely (although from your screenshot, it looks like all the points line). I would go ahead and check your splines and make sure that all the points that connected them actually closed the profile. You can make use of the extend tool in the Sketch menu to extend your lines to see if this closes the profile. Then if it does, you can use the trim command to get rid of the excess. Once they are closed it should work. If you would like, you can share the model with me and I can take a peek to see what is going on. My email is [email protected].

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Hi James,

Thanks for the reply! I had a careful look at my splines and even with the extend tool couldn't manage to close them (although I'm sure I'm doing something wrong). I did email you with a public link to my project. I look forward to hearing from you!

[James.Youmatz · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

So for some reason (and honestly off the top of my head I'm not sure why) your sketches did not register as being in the plane that you were trying to sketch on. Maybe you accidentally moved some of those points out of the sketch plane or perhaps was accidentally 3d sketching? Just to check, when you created your offset planes, you used those planes as your sketch planes correct? My fix was to go in and edit the sketch. Then I would select the spline and right-click and select "Move to Sketch Plane." I created a quick screencast showing how I fixed this error, how I created the loft, and I also at the end of the screencast showed how I created my sketches on offset planes, just in case you were doing it a different way. Check it out below!

Hopefully this helped solve the issue! If it did, please feel free to mark this answer as a solution, that way others experiencing a similar issue can benefit from this thread. If you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to let me know. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Wow! Thanks so much for the quick video, that sure made things easy! You also showed me how to use Shift+Middle Mouse to rotate my model... I kept going to the axis up top. That makes everything really clear, I can now see how I must have mis-positioned the 2nd and 3rd sketches although the 1st I thought I created on the plane.

Nonetheless thanks for the great help!

Andrew