Fusion
I can reproduce this. Let me take a look. Not sure why this is a self-intersection, but I'll try to find out
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
@et_cetera - this model is going to be the end of one or both of us... 😀
I got it to work. Lofts are tricky business, and require lots of tweaking sometimes. I did not record the entire thing, and don't have time to start over. But, the main thing I did is to tweak two of your rails. It helps to look at rails with curvature combs on:
Areas of high curvature are going to likely be problems. That applies to the center rail - it is very curvy in the "nose" area. I tweaked the angle of the final line, and the spline handles a bit:
For the other rail, on the left in the first image, there are just too many control points in that spline. A good rule of thumb is to use as few control points or fit points as you can. Lots of points results in curvature changes along the curve, which you don't want. This is what I ended up with:
much smoother. I also had to move some of the control points near the front, because they were sticking too far out, and causing self-intersecting loft results.
I've attached my repaired model. Not sure you can learn a ton from it, but just in case you want to look at it. Basically, the method is just: tweak the rails a bit, try a loft, tweak more if it fails, etc. It can also help to try to select the rails in different orders. That's how I found which rails were the problem children, and so was able to modify those.
Hope this helps!
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
No worries. I was just trying to be funny... Apologies if that comment came across negatively. Loft is hard, and this one has tested my knowledge and skills, so this is a good thing.
Yeah, this is a very unfortunate bit of UI. The Curvature Comb analysis tool does not apply to sketches, but sketches have their own tool for this. You have to select the sketch curves (double click will select the whole chain), then right click and choose Toggle Curvature Display from the context menu:
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
@et_cetera wrote:
I can definitely try to start over from scratch. This is actually my very first Fusion project, so I don't have any prior experience or projects to show. If you have any suggestions, feel free to DM me. 🙂
This is a public Forum and contributions are public, so everyone can benefit 😉
I would generally not consider for this to be beginner material. It isn't unusual for people to see shapes they like and try to re-create these shapes using a CAD or other modeling software, however, you've got to learn to crawl, before you start walking.
Surfacing is very technical and requires some understanding of NURBS surfaces.
Here are some references:
Autodesk Alias Theory Builders
