Issue with lofting airfoil profiles

[Anonymous]

Hello, I'm having some trouble lofting a few simple airfoil shapes. I've imported two NACA 0005 airfoils with chords of 3 and 2 in an attempt to loft a wing shape that tapers. I was able to do this just the other day, but now I get an error saying that

"Error: Loft1 Reference Failures. The loft could not be created. Try changing the inputs, swapping profiles for rails or a centerline, or adjusting the continuity conditions."

Before it was saying it could not create a meaningful geometry change, or something along those lines. I'm not really sure what to do for this, as it seems to be a very simple lofting operation.

[TheCADWhisperer]

Did you attach correct image file?

Can you attach your *.f3d file here?

One test I use is try to use the profiles as Extrude rather than Loft.

If they won't Extrude - they are not going to Loft.

[Anonymous]

Sorry about that, definitely the wrong screen shot lol! I am able to extrude it, just checked. Thank you for any help!

[Anonymous]

I'm starting to think that the main issue is that my loft profiles are too similar (identical even.. haha). I generated the profiles using the same NACA designation, but with different scaling for the chord. Because of how they are made, the points that make up the splice are in the same relative position, and since I kept getting another error saying that the loft could not create a meaningful geometry change, I think this similarity is just not suited for lofting. Since I was attempting to make just a simple taper in the wing, I looked into how to use guides and rails with sweeps and lofts, and sweeping with a guide seems to be the more appropriate method for achieving what I wanted. It seems to have worked! 🙂

[jbarchuk]

The loft just worked perfectly well for me. Are you at F3 version 2.0.2139?

[Anonymous]

Hmm.. I am on version 2.0.2139, running off a MacBook Pro

[LMD001]

Hello ZakaiOlsen,

Tried this and I can't get the profiles to loft, the preview seems OK.

Then I Extruded the 2 profiles, they extrude OK,  and tried to Loft the resulting faces, again lofting error.

I scaled the 2 extruded bodies by 10 and the loft went OK.

However doing the same scaling on the sketch profiles does not work.

Not sure if this could be an issue here but the splines do not look very "clean" when zoomed in, but this could be graphics related.

I also tried to project the curves in a new sketch, the larger one worked OK, the smaller one would result in a degenerated curve, so I'm guessing there is an issue with the curves.

Hope is of any help.

Best regards,

Ludo

[LMD001]

Hi again ZakaiOlsen,

When I zoomed in far enough on the smaller curve I got this:

I'm sure this could cause lofting errors.

Best regards,

Ludo

[TheCADWhisperer]

Contrary to popular belief - more points does not equate to a better curve.

You actually want as few points as possible.

[LMD001]

Yep, absolutely so, as is often the case: less is more.

[TheCADWhisperer]

6 nodes in each sketch vs whatever number you had in your sketches.

(see attached)