Loft
Use Loft to blend between sections. Select two or more profiles and press L. The tool builds the surface that runs through all of them, in the order you picked them.
Picking the profiles
Select at least two things, then press L. Unlike every other feature here, a loft cannot be started empty and filled in later, because the tool only exists while two or more profiles are selected. With one profile, or none, the Loft button is not on the toolbar and L does nothing at all.
A profile is a sketch region or a face of a body, and you can mix the two freely in one loft: a face at the bottom, a sketch region halfway up, another face at the top. The tool only appears when your selection is exactly profiles, meaning two or more faces and regions with no edges, vertices, bodies, planes or axes among them.
Order is selection order. The loft runs through the sections in the order you picked them, and there is no way to reorder them afterwards. Re-picking replaces the whole list rather than adding to it, so re-select the profiles from scratch when you want to change a loft.
Transition and loop
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Transition | Smooth blends through the sections with curvature. Ruled joins them with straight runs, giving a faceted, chamfer-like result |
| Loop | Closed carries the surface from the last section back round to the first, for a ring or a torus-like shape |
The popover itself is not translated. Its rows read Profiles, Transition, Loop, Combine and Body in every language.
Closed is not a separate kind of surface. It adds the first section again at the end, so two profiles plus Closed means a section, another, and the first one back again. Keep Closed for three or more.
Closed also changes what you can select afterwards. An open loft caps its two ends and those caps are named faces you can find again later, while a closed one has no caps and nothing to name.
What it does not check
Almost nothing about your sections is checked before the loft is built:
- Sections with holes are refused. That one is checked, and it is the loft's only real restriction. Loft a ring section as a solid and bore it afterwards.
- Nothing checks that your sections are parallel, sensibly ordered, or that they do not self-intersect. Pick them out of order and the surface twists between them, without a warning.
- Nothing checks that a picked face is planar, despite the tool being described in terms of planar faces. A curved face is accepted and the result is whatever comes out of it.
- Section start points are not aligned. A loft between a face and a sketch region can twist through a quarter turn for no visible reason, because the two sections start at different corners.
When it fails, the message comes back raw and untranslated. ThruSections did not converge is the common one, and it means the sections were too different, too far apart, or in an order that asks for a surface with no sane solution. Try again with fewer sections, closer together, in a better order.
See also
- Stepped Extrudes: stacked bands from one sketch
- Sweep: carrying one section along a route
- Regions and Profiles: what counts as a profile