Fusion 360 Lofts For Beginners (10 Things To Learn)

what are the 10 things that beginners need to know when it comes to lofting whether it's the amount of profiles how to control them which guide rails to use how to solve between face to face and adjust for curvature it's all coming up hey this is tyler back with tekken espresso okay tip number one there are three types of lofts there's a solid loft that you can find in the create command there is the orange surface loft that basically has no thickness and you'd have to thicken it if you want to use it later for solid geometry and finally there's the sculpted loft that you can find in the form workspace number two keep in mind that you don't always need loft when you have one profile becoming another in this example i have a rectangle that tapers out or a rectangle that tapers down and usually people are thinking about aloft for this example but you can achieve that with an extrude where you are extruding one shape and you're applying a taper so just keep that in mind that if it is just a simple shape that needs to taper at some certain angle then you can achieve that with extrude number three generally it's two points two sketches and two different shapes so let's look at it first we start by working from like a rectangle and then we use the construction plane go off at a distance and now we're going to sketch the second profile which in this case happens to be a circle this is a great example of loft because we're going from one very different profile to another very different profile and that's what loft does really well we're going to do the solid loft from one profile to the next it keeps track of each one so this is my first selection second selection and if we add more we'd continue to add and there's some options that we'll get into in just a minute but we're lofting from one profile to the other again we're solving a pretty complex geometry here that could not be achieved with like a revolve or an extrude we're transitioning from a circle to a rectangle four connectors this is the way you can add a lot more control and solution to your loft let's just say that you're solving from the corner of each rectangle up to the circle but you'd like for it to kind of neck down on this side and be wider on the top side so we'll maybe change our view here i'm going to drag these connectors and it's resolving so it's adding this kind of taper on this back side and we're going wider on the other side so it's changing the way it solves adding this taper at this end adding in a bigger opening there and we can do that by dragging the connectors number five you do not have to have sketches so i'm basically breaking that earlier general rule right so we can loft from two faces we'll do a search for loft with our s key and i'm gonna select the face and the other face you know there you notice they're two very different profiles and it's solving between them so you can just loft from face to face you don't have to have sketches number six the curvature solution so in this one i'd like to have it kind of transition a little bit smoother to create this um head of this golf club okay so let's go to the dialog i'm gonna choose to solve this second to the second profile with tangency it's going to resolve and you can see it introduces that nice curve and that's more in line with the design that i'm trying to solve there are additional parameters you can adjust like tangency weight number seven you can loft to a point rectangle to a point i'm going to choose loft we start our loft command we go from rectangle to a point and it does solve now a few other options to be aware of this doesn't just exist in the point example but you can control what's called direction and that's effectively in this case we're solving how long does it stay in a rectangle before transitioning to the next profile so we can control that i want a rectangle for a while and then transition to the point also do you want to solve to a sharp point or would you like it to solve with tangency number eight when you've got multi profiles if you click out of order fusion is going to try to solve it but it's going to freak out so i'm adding this as third and it's almost inverting on itself that won't solve what we can do is reorder so i can set this to profile two and now it's solving in the right order but if you need to close it out and then just select your profiles in the correct order this time solving much better number nine let's talk about guide rails this one can be tricky it's very powerful but tricky so what i'm going to do is introduce a spline and you'll notice that i'm going to sketch off just barely to the side and solve it hit the check mark i've got this spline we can continue to manipulate the spline with its handles get this just how we want it but the important thing is that your rail connect to the profile so what i like to do is select the both i'm going to use the look at do the point to the point and do coincident great and that's the lower profile this upper one i'm going to try to connect it as well and do coincident sometimes fusion won't connect it's very quirky so you may have to change your approach to make sure that it's adding a coincidence at both profiles if there's multiple profiles like say there is a middle we want to make sure that that's also connecting through the rail let's do a test and make sure that this loft solves so if i choose loft profile profile and we choose the rail it solves looks good now the other side isn't what i wanted to do and generally speaking it's a good idea to have almost opposing rails um to provide a thorough solution for what you want coming back to the sketch so let's introduce another spline so we'll sketch that and i'm going to do something similar but maybe this time it's a little wider than the other i'll hit the check mark and again i need to make sure that there's that coincident relationship maybe even adjust that spline handle once we get that closer to what we want do the point to the point coincident make sure they connect and then use your spline control to maybe solve how you want if you want this kind of solving more at an angle or coming in horizontally so we can come in more vertically or more horizontal we can solve that way we'll hit the check finish the sketch let's now try the loft again this time solving between two profiles and that solves i don't really know what i built here but you can see the power of having both rails on both sides and you have that control number 10 when you have multiple profiles that you know and you have those sketches and you have the distances loft is an incredibly easy way to solve this simply selecting those pri profiles then adding any additional guide rails for more control can help you solve your design faster with a sweep this would be tricky because you're limited to one guide rail and trying to solve between these different changes in that shape it can be limiting infusion so a good fit for the loft hey and if you're trying to learn sweep check out the top 10 tips for beginners learning sweet

Channel: Tyler Beck of Tech & Espresso

Views: 35,176

Keywords: autodesk, autodesk cad, autodesk fusion 360, cad, cad in the cloud, cad software, cloud based cad, design, free cad, free cad program, fusion 360, fusion 360 tutorial, fusion 360 tutorial beginner, fusion 360 tutorials, loft, mechanical design, product design, tyler beck

Id: 5IjTV376fqo

Length: 8min 33sec (513 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020