How do we smooth the surface?

[Anonymous]

We are having trouble with the loft when we create the model its produces a rough surface, how do we fix the issue? 

I have attached the fsd file. Thank you for the help 🙂

[jean.flower]

Hi waliserwilliam and thanks for posting!

I took a look at your file. My recommendation is to explore the loft setting for "merge tangent faces". 

In your f3d file, this is set to merge, but the loft gets a better (less skewed) shape from your inputs if the option is set to "keep tangent faces".  Maybe you could explore that option and see if you like the result better?

I also noticed that your sketches are not completely constrained.  In general, that makes things a bit more difficult to work with, but in this case, the missing "G1-continuous" constraints between edges in your sketches will make geometry that's not quite aligned for the downstream surface generation.

Here's a view of the loft I get after setting G1-continuous conditions on the sketches and keeping tangent faces separate.  The loft faces are not curvature-continuous where they join, but that's to be expected because the sketches are also only G1-continuous and not G2-continuous.  There are some jaggedy aspects to the visualisation of the curvature - I'll see if we can look into this, I think it's just a quirk of the analysis tool, and not an indication that your loft is poor quality.

Hope that helps!

Jean

[jeff_strater]

I agree with Jean on the resulting curvature map.  I highly suspect that this is just a graphical artifact, not a bad underlying surface.  A couple of things to try:

Use the "high quality" on the analysis setup dialog:  here is a simple model with the standard setting:

and also, set the Display Detail Control to "Fixed" and "High":

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for looking into the issue looks a million times better, is it possible you could give me .f3d file that you created?

[jean.flower · Accepted solution]

Hi waliserwilliam,

I made significant edits to your file to simplify it while I was exploring the loft.  All that's left is four sketches, and to make a cleaner visual, I even deleted some superfluous geometry from those sketches!  But in case it's still useful to you, here's the trimmed-down file I created.

I also noticed along the way you might have used some more sketch constraints.  To lock things down a bit more.  And I suspect the "mirror" constraint might have been useful...

Good luck!

Jean

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for the help, and yes before the loft had 8 layers and we realized it was causing problems to the surface so we removed all but the four.