3D Sketch and Loft

Product designers often require significant interactive control over the shaped they are creating. With improvements made in 2006, it is now possible to use a single 3D Sketch to create a loft Feature. In addition, you can dynamically edit the 3D sketch when creating or redefining the loft. This is very useful because you can more easily and quickly define design intent by getting immediate feedback as to what the surface will look like when adjusting the 3D Sketch curves.

Here’s how you do it: Create a single 3D Sketch which contains all the Profiles and Guides geometry needed for the loft. These can be a combination of splines, arcs, lines etc. Insert/Surface/Loft and start to populate the Profile and Guide selection boxes with the curves you wish to use for your loft surface. You can use the Sketch Tools Selection area of Property Manager to select your 3D Sketch entities.Once you’ve made your selections and have a preview surface, you can click “Drag Sketch” and directly edit the sketches by moving vertices, changing dimensions, even dragging angle vector and weighting of spline handles. Unlike traditional methods of “pre-building” many sketch features, Loft with 3D Sketch capability makes it fast and convenient to define and re-define Loft features. This is very important for product designers because often times it is essential to get just the right shape by visualizing that shape. See the instantaneous “before” and “after” shape is important when evaluating what the right aesthetic and function solution should be.