Using the LOFT TOOL in Autodesk Fusion 360

Oh what's up guys Justin here with the fusion essentials comm back with another Autodesk fusion 360 tool tutorial so in today's video we're gonna talk about the loft tool and how you can use it to create complex skins using sketches inside a fusion 360 so let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so what its simplest form lofting is basically taking two shapes and creating a skin using those shapes and in this case we're gonna call the shapes profiles so the way that you would do this is there's a tool under the create drop-down inside of fusion 360 called loft and if you activate the loft tool what that does is that pops up a menu that allows you to select different profiles and when you select profiles fusion 360 will use those profiles to create a skin so in this situation say that I selected this box in this circle you can see how this comes in and this creates a skin that basically averages all of the different edges and everything so it uses math to figure out where a logical face would be for an object like this so you can see how if you were trying to model something like this yourself this would be fairly difficult but by using the loft tool it's a lot easier and so this can work on objects with multiple different profiles so you're not limited to two profiles you can really use as many profiles as you want so for example if we were to take all of these circles we were to activate the loft tool and select them as profiles you can see how as we select these what fusion 360 is going to do is it's going to start lofting a face across these profiles so you can see how this is using the edges of these circles in order to figure out where a shape would be a based on the shapes that we have selected and so when you do this and we're gonna go back to this first example for a second when you do this we'll just edit this feature there's also options in here for affecting how strongly each shape affects the overall lofted face so for example my profile one is my top profile well I can select this option for direction and we can click and drag this and you can set how high or low the transition starts between the shapes so for example if you wanted this to be more cylindrical you can drag this direction down if you wanted this to be more square you could drag this up so you can set this to just kind of average using the connected function or for either one of these profiles you can dictate the strength of that effect by selecting the direction option and so notice when you're selecting the direction option you can also set a takeoff angle which allows you to set which allows you to it affect the angle at which these objects are created so and this is something that I've always just had to kind of play around with until I get the result that I want so you can see how you can get vastly different results depending on how strongly you if you make these changes so just know that the ability to affect these shapes is in here by selecting the connection or by selecting the direction function rather than connected and so one thing I want to point out is your selection can significantly affect the kind of shape that you're creating so for example if I had these three curves on an arc and I was to activate the loft tool and select the edges so if I was to select the edges along all of these you can see how I get a shape that goes from the edge of the circle to the edge of the circle to the edge of the circle well not only can you select profiles like this you can also select points so in this situation if I was to remove that profile and click on the center point instead you can see how this object is actually going to come to a point rather than going around the perimeter so you can select the central point of something like this circle in order to get this to reduce at the end to come to a point so and you can kind of affect this you can affect how strongly this effect happens as well by selecting the point tangent function and so you can select if this is rounder on the end or if it goes more straight to a point almost more like a cone you can affect that by selecting the point tangent and adjusting the way that comes together as well so one of the more powerful features contained inside this tool is the ability to make your shapes follow a path using rails so for example right now if I was to try to loft a shape along these two profiles you can see how I get this this kind of diagonal cone kind of shape or not even cone more of a cylinder kind of shape that runs between these two but it's not really a useful shape because it doesn't have any information about how it should get from here to here so what you can do though is you can add a line call the rail and what a rail is is it rails basically a path that you tell this tool to follow and so all I did is I just drew a line in here with the sketch tool and then if I was to click the plus button and click on this path and you're gonna want the center line function in this case but you can see how by selecting this path you can dictate that you want this shape to run up and along here rather than in a straight line so the ability to use those guides to direct this allows you to create even more interesting shapes and so one thing I want to point out is there's two different ways to do this so the center line is basically gonna say okay I want you to take this whole thing and I want it to run along this path but I want you to use these shapes in order to dictate the shape that's created there's also a function in here for rails well what the rails function will do is the rails function can be used not only to dictate the path but also the shape that's created so if I was to select these two profiles right now you can see how this creates that very simple shape that we had in here before however if I was to add a sketch in here that runs along a curve so if I was to sketch a curve like this and then select that as a rail what that's gonna do is that's gonna direct the way that this effect goes and so right now this gets a little bit weird because we've only added one rail in here however if we were to come in here and add a second rail and so we'll just come in here and we'll just right-click on this sketch and edit it and we'll just mirror it real quick so I'll just draw a little edge right here and then we'll mirror this object across this line so now we have two of those then we'll click finish' sketch so now we have a second sketch in here that we can use is our second rail and then adjust our loft function to include that rail as well you can see how what this does is this more strongly dictates that this needs to follow both rails and you'll notice that this doesn't follow this exactly so there's some limitations in here on how far this can adjust these edges based on the constraints that we give it but you can see how you can still affect the way that this shape is created by using the rails function so that's permanent in this video leave a comment below and let me know what you thought was this helpful to you have you used this to create shapes like this I just love having that conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new fusion 360 content every week as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The Fusion Essentials

Views: 79,628

Keywords: fusion 360 tutorials, the fusion essentials, the fusion essentials tutorials, fusion 360 lessons, fusion 360 for beginners, getting started with Fusion 360, getting started autodesk fusion 360, autodesk fusion, autodesk fusion 360, autodesk fusion essentials, autodesk fusion 360 essentials

Id: TcbhyPq65dk

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020