BEST PRACTICE: How to Loft

hey everyone my name is Mike Aubrey I'm one of the evangelists on the fusion 360 team and that's me in the left if you didn't know what I looked like already this is my friend Jamie and my friend grant and the point of this video actually isn't to talk about our hiking trip it's to talk about how you would create something like this tent infusion and we use lofting it's what the the feature is called and we've had a lot of questions lately actually on our product forms and then just individual one-on-one interactions I found there's a lot of questions that are surrounding best practices of how to use lofting and then just some general questions of how does even set up lofting infusion because there's actually a fair amount of experience within our community with people who are very familiar with lofting just not with how to do it with with infusion so the purpose of this video is to run you through a couple of examples the first one being this this simple tent example the next one being this variable profile shape the kind of a squarish top and a rectangle shop and right roundish bottom of this ring and this whisky bottle which is a very classic profile based loft and through these examples I'm going to show you just kind of different types of lofting you can do with infusion and also along the way hopefully show you a couple of best practices of how I've been successful using lofting with infusion so with that let's get started and we'll start actually with this whisky bottle to begin with this is a really a really classic profile based loft that's set up here and I think it's a great place to start for you if you've if you haven't seen lofting before or if you you have and you're just looking for some maybe some interesting ways to set up your loft for your for your projects so at its core what lofting is is it takes two different profiles and comes up with the geometry would take to create a solid to resolve between those two profiles so let's take a look aloft if you go and you just choose loft the most simple way is to create a series of profiles like this I've created these different circles and rectangles in a line you just going you just start choosing them so I just choose this first profile second profile and just start working your way in the order you want to to terminate them and so we can say 1 2 3 4 we just keep working our way down here I just keep selecting them and your shape will start to evolve so this first shape we've created here with just a series of circles that's something you could create with a revolve but going from a circle to a rectangle this right here this type of crazy shape that is at the core what lofting can get you and you can see yeah we can create it really gnarly looking shape here really quickly just with a series of profiles that's so yeah Matt that's that's a classic loft you're looking at there and the order you select the matters that's why I went kind of top to bottom you can actually if you're gonna go you can if you change the order these Tings terminate they might have some trouble I won't go into that but just telling you the order matters and that's our that's our loft so how did I create these profiles to begin with I want to show you share with you I think what I think is a best practice for me anyway is that I set up each of these sketches are on their own planes so like if I go and if I just click on this top little guy right here I can hover over them you can see highlights that's linked to this plane number seven and I can see that by hovering over it and I also know that if I click on this guy it's right here on the timeline you can see how that guy turn-turn it got darkened and and this is this is a way that you can find where things are but I've actually found that a faster way for me with these types of lofts to set up my model is rather than having to worry about where the planes are and how they're set up and just series creating just a series of offset planes like this you're kind of just saying hey one is always going to be ten millimeters above it that's fine but you'll have to remember where they are and you have to do this little dance with the timeline every time you'd want to maybe go and edit it so a faster way for me to keep track of my different planes is actually I just link them all up to a common sketch so check this out I have all these planes linked up so I can just kind of quickly move these around on my on my sketch move them up there we go and let me show you how I set that up so the way I did this is I have this top level guy and by the way I should really call this like a I call this like a skeleton like a profile skeleton because it's providing basically the backbone to my entire model so I like naming sky is that I'm going to be using everything later and if I go when I go into this guy all I do is that I just create a sketch with a couple lines so like this guy know hold this guy and then I go and instead of using that offset plane I actually do a plane at angle I'll click this angle right here and I'll just make it 90 or whatever you want you can do there doesn't have to be 90 just in this case it made sense to make it a 90 and then you have something that's linked to a sketch and again you can do the same thing with the offset but I just think this is a lot cleaner because it helps me keep things visual as opposed to just organized but moving on let me let me show you go to next level on on profiles and and add add another element to to your lofting and actually let's not do the ten yet let's do this ring so here's another example of using a using two profiles so here's just sort of a rectangle and then the bottom is a circle but you can't create a law from here to there directly because it's that's infinitely thin we actually need to assign a direction that we want the loft to execute and let me show you how to set up a guide rail and so along with it I'll show you about other best practice of how to set up stuff let's just make it I'm going to use projected points to reference my profiles to my guiding rail actually it's not a rail it's a center point so I'm going to start off actually instead of creating my profiles I'm going to create the path that I want to create because this is important for a ring because you want to make sure you're precise about where your what your inner diameter is for to make sure the finger can probably fit into the ring so here's my inner diameter for my ring and that's going to be my path very cool and now if I stop my sketch actually I'm going to need to give it a I want to give it up diameters well I did give it a dimer good good good okay and now I am going to create a sketch on this perpendicular to it and I will reference in I'll intersect actually that those the circle through the new sketch so those are going to be the intersection points and then I'll curse start creating a nice shape to to link to so here we'll just create our quick little rectangle and I'm going to make a ActionAid midpoint to this point right here so as the thing will update it will update symmetrically and we'll give it a dimension say this maybe two we'll call this three or so very cool actually I should have a like let me give a let me give that the fill it's here let's go a point four like you actually right click repeat the command point four actually let's make them so they're all linked this guy's actually d4 is the value so actually I'm going to make this guy d4 as well so these guys are going to be all these will be linked up it's going to be d4 as well and d4 excellent and then I'll just go and put those dimensions back to and then we'll go from here to here call us three get enough okay and I will finish up by making a quick little circle here a little two point maybe go from you to you actually I think I want is I want this guy to update well I'm going to give this guy just to call a construction line so that when it updates it'll stay on top of this guy instead of trying to go back below it call this guy three very cool and there's a shape so let's show you so the reason why I did this is if I go and update this layer these profiles will stay together but let's make the loft real real quick and just show you how you'd set this thing up so if I go say profile to profile it's going to fail make sense because it can't go do something of infinite thinness now let's give it a path on this guy will give a failure to but that's okay because what it is is it's trying to treat it as a rail and it can't but we'll show you rails in a second basically right now there's no rail because there's nothing to rail against so what actually what all it needs right now is a path and that's what these center lines do if you call it a center line well then it's telling you like Oh take this guy and move it along that path until you get to your your destination and there's your has a really cool looking loft and that's a really funky shape and we'll call them actually if I go closed anyone better if you go close it will actually close itself up and go both sides there we are so why do we do this so it was linked well I'll check it out so if we go and make this guy bigger let me make it a 19 or something now you can do that no big deal just to update maybe when I could see you guys can see this maybe make more cosmetic update their hair move this thing back and forth yeah so we got this guy linked I should go back and actually connect that center point to make it sure it's symmetric actually let's just do that the reason why I was doing that is because I didn't tell it to stay on I want you to be vertical with this guy I want you there we are and now we can't move there anyway all right now so now this guy's locked down nice looking loft now let's move on to the next example let's talk about the tent so we've talked so far we've talked about just basic profiles to create lofts we've talked about making a profiles using a centerline or basically a guiding path for where a loft will move and we've talked about open versus closed and what that looks like let's talk about how to make this funky shape let's push it back and the way to do this is I've actually created a just a base and then I'm giving it actually some guiding rails to make this happen and so one things you'll notice real fast out of this is that I have one profile but I don't have a second profile to go to and that's okay because fusion supports actually going to a point just as well as its sports going to a profile so that's what we're doing right here and what you see here is that point is it's trying to go as fast as a can to the termination point so you get this kind of this this pyramid effect and so this is a great example where we can use rails now instead of a path so if I go in just clues choose the side beside a rail right here I'll choose this guy and you can see that at all and now it's able to control it'll hold that rail and create a different shape now if I go and I just kind of keep clicking them you'll notice that I'm using the same selecting mechanism as I did for profiles what is inferring what it needs to be and so is I will next thing I choose it's already on rails it'll try and make another rail but notice that I have chain selection on so if I choose this well this chain is going on there it's going to become self intersecting and it's going to it's not going to look right actually just to show you what it looks like I'll click it you can see it's not going to work so if it doesn't work and it won't don't forget don't fret unclick it oh it's all good and instead turn off the chain select and actually one step you'll see another thing appears it'll say that can you also merge the edges and we don't want it to merge it is we want it to be just sewn standalone rail so turn it off and then try this guy now and you'll see that this tent will start to start to adhere to the boundaries we want to go to so it's still on rails very good and we're there we are I got a pretty gnarly looking tent again this is awesome because we now have this stuff linked back to a sketchy little update so like if I go in maybe move this guy around you can move it over a little bit here then the the loft will update so that's one way to to create this type of a shape let me show you another way to get after this Emmet because guide rails guys rails are really powerful when you know precisely where you want to go they can be a bit tedious because what I've done to set up this one you can see is I actually went and I referenced again my where I was going to I had this side profile I had this point and so I actually I created a sketch and I projected those points and then linked them to my rail that's that's definitely the best practice but it can be kind of tedious let me show you another way if you're creating something like this maybe a faster way to go would be instead to just go ahead and use this go to the point but then maybe use point tangency instead let's check this guy out what point tangency does is rather than going the fastest way to terminate is this actually saying vamp down the loft so that it'll maintain a tangency it to the profile to the the plane that that point was was placed on and so that's what you're seeing here everything just just moves its slope down to zero and it's also doing it at a certain rate so actually let me show you this little arrow here and make sure you have if you're going to try this turnoff the incremental move because if you have incremental to remove out turned on it'll be a it'll be too much if I go and I just cart for pulling this guy you can see you can so you can how quickly it vamps itself down as well and there's a there is a scalar value that goes with it and it's actually subject to what the original units were and when I first created this part I had it in millimeters so actually if it's 10 millimeters that's actually the the normal condition that the equivalent of like some some scalars we have with infusion or zero to one this actually starts at 10 so if I'd started in feet it would have been 10 feet but since I started millimeters is 10 millimeters if I go if I go higher than 10 millimeters if I go to something like 15 that's actually the the fat case the convex case if you go to someone like 5 you'll see it'll go concave underneath and so you know to resolve itself very quickly so you can get yourself something pretty close so actually maybe a lot smoother looking parabola because I just kind of eyeballed these these splines and whereas this guy's got a nice little vamp down parabola equation going with it that's probably the better way to do this put this piece so I got this guy and I got a nice looking like second locked okay so showing you three examples using the solid modeling environment and let me show you some stuff of some stuff using lofts in the sculpted modeling environment you know a lot of us that have come through the inventor installers world we know how powerful solid lofting can be but a lot of uh I mean a lot of us that made the switch actually said well you know that said solid lofting is really kind of a pain in the butt um is there a is there a better way to do it so we can get all the extreme flexibility of sculpting and the answer is yes you can just do a loft within the sculpting environment so the same functionality exists so if I go and I do this loft actually if I go from here to here just use the same same setup as you did before and this will fail and then I'll choose this guy as being a use this as a as a center line they're going actually we can close it so all the same tools exist for you it's just that you have the added control of being able to choose how you want your t-spline services or your I'll just call them your your two bodies to form so actually this guy I can go with see what you like to know I can't hold it okay you can see that I'm adding detail based on what if based on what it can hold and so uniform difference between uniform and curvature is uniform keeps equal spacing between each of these lines you see a line here line here one two three four because that's how many I've dictated and I'll do four cross for each of those profiles so actually maybe if we go down so actually probably maybe eight probably makes more sense because I'll go eight here it'll be uniform whereas if I go with the curvature you can see it'll actually tell basically what it needs to actually truly hold the curvature that's a lot of that's a lot of t-spawn shapes that section I'm going to go with uniform and I think eight will work about right and let's see if I can can I put this thing down maybe two will work yeah so one two across each of these lines so one two and there we go I've got myself a really nice-looking nice-looking the sculpted body just turn on this guy that I can then go and I can take advantage of for all my actually there we go you want just these guys and I can I actually have oh that's the next thing we kind of play around with so it's it looks it looks like it's in a great state but actually if you uh you try this guy out you can see that some of them may or may not be connected see this guy there's a little hole in there yeah so we might have to go in and stitch them up and for those of you have used a product like alias or I know this will be familiar to you if you're coming from like SolidWorks or inventor you might that might be a little foreign to you but fortunately take heart it's actually quite easy all we need to do is we just need to stitch them up there so what I'm going to do is that we need to just make sure we merge all the adjacent vertices together so this is actually really good just try it go to merge your or weld vertices choose well des tolerance and then just window the whole thing and basically everything every point that's going to be closed within this tolerance will merge itself together and now you have one one body as opposed to the many bodies and you can do still cool things like start you know the stuff that you like doing and t-splines you know kind of move things around pick edges move around and also if you are if you already kind of think in terms of lofting like profiles and rails but you want to have the flexibility of t-splines a loft is a great way to get you started and well probably let's let's leave with that I think this this video is probably get a little long if you guys got questions shoot me shoot me a message in the comment board and I hope this was super useful showing you some different ways you can set up and take advantage of lofting along with a couple of best practices along the way take care bye

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 118,318

Keywords: fusion 360, autodesk, design, engineering, mechanical design, mechanical engineering, industrial design, product design, software, CAD, CAD software, Computer Aided Design, Modeling, Rendering, 3D software, Autodesk fusion 360, cloud based CAD, CAD in the cloud, cloud, Free CAD, Free CAD Software, Autodesk CAD, cloud manufacturing, free CAD program, 3D CAD solution, lofting, tutorial, cad tutorial, tips, cad tips

Id: fXQ28AVaMh0

Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 11 2015