CAD Forum

It's been a while and I'm beginning to feel like an idiot. I could swear I'm basically using the guided curve the way it shows in the little image but it does not love it

I just wanna fill/empty the volume of this model I was given and I'm struggling to get something goin

Change order in the first box. Might be the cause. I'm having a blank as to what is the actual solution as I don't use loft except for specific purposes.

Edit: Validate start/end conditions also.

It looks like you're trying to move from too much of the small end to the large end. You should be using at most 1/2 of the small end.

Plus, you're definitely trying to loft too much at once. A loft should be a single smooth feature. The big squarish end should be an extrude. The loft should be from the small end through the arc to the squarish shape. Bad description, but you should break this up into a couple of features without doing the whole thing at once.

Also, this looks simple enough that you might be able to just make a couple of extrudes and use fillets to round it. I don't normally say that, but without seeing a lot of detail here, that might be a way to go.

If you're just trying to fill the solid, I'd cap off one end and then copy the main surface and delete the edges of that hole in the face. Lofting a solid over that imported part isn't going to come anywhere what you want to do. It should be a set of surfacing operations.

Looks like your going from a rectangle shape to a round shape, if so you need more guide curves and need to break your round shape into the same number of segments as your rectangle profile. It's not required by SW but it usually works better when you have more complicated shapes

This is what happens when you have 1 guide curve

When going from a rectangle to a round shape, I always have 4 straight lines and four radii. On the square end, the radius may only be 0.001" and on the round end, the flats may only be 0.001", but in my experience, the chances of a successful loft go way up if the geometry on either end is the same, even if the dimensions aren't.

It mostly worked better when I added more guide curves so that seems to be the answer. I thought it was a little more intuitive than that but there we have it