From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Loft tool - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Loft tool

- [Instructor] The Loft command allows me to take one sketch and then morph that sketch into the next, and so on. We can actually have multiple sketches, and we can morph that shape through as many as we'd like. Let me show you the most basic example here. So I've got a sketch already defined right over here, and right above it, I'll--or actually, right attached to it here, is another little line, which we'll show you in a little second. But, I need another sketch up above this one, so I can transform this initial sketch here into the next. So, what I'm going to go ahead and do, is just go ahead and create a plane, which is directly above this top plane. All right, so I'm going to come up here under Features, come over here to Reference Geometry, come over to Plane, and let's just go ahead and drag a plane, or just type in a value here and type it. So, it's little higher up than there, click okay, and there's my plane. So I'm going to start on that plane, start a sketch, and this time I'm going to just create a really basic rectangle, or actually a square. So here's my center-point rectangle, and I'm going to make that rectangle so it turns into a square by making both sides equal, and then let's just go ahead and add a dimension from the original sketch here to this one, and I'll say that's 1.5. Okay, now notice, we've got four corners of this part, and four of the other base sketch. So, it's going to be a pretty straightforward and simple Loft command. So now that I'm out of that, I've got this sketch here, which is defining the ending point, and then I have sketch two, which is going to be used in a second, and then sketch one is the original sketch here. So, okay, so you come up to the Feature ribbon bar, and click on Lofted Boss or Bass, and my Profiles. So I'm going to start with my profile on the bottom, so I'm going to twirl this down and I'm going to say, sketch number one's going to be my first profile, and sketch number three is going to be my ending profile. So, just that easily, it was able to create a loft between those two shapes, and it looks pretty good. When you're happy, click on the green check mark, and there you have your very first loft. Now I'm going to go ahead and hide that plane. All right, and there's our loft. Now we can also go back and modify how this lofted feature works. So come back over here to the Loft. Now notice over here, we have this thing called Starting and Ending Constraints. If you click on that, notice we have, it says None, and we also have the option for doing a Direction Vector, or Normal To Profile. So let me show you Normal To Profile first. So you click on that one there, and it gives me this value, or this little handle I can pull up, and that affects the shape. So you can get some really wild shapes by dragging this handle up, 'cause it's defining how much control that normal force has on our shape. So we can make it billow out a little bit, like you see here. If you wanted instead to change it to a Direction Vector, you could choose a vector. So in this case here, I could choose something like that, and it's going to be pushing it out to the side, and that's going to be controlling the shape a little bit as I go. So you can also type in a value here if you'd like to, but if I switch back over here to Normal To Profile, again, I can change this value here if want to have more or less control, as well as rotating it around. So, that's going to be the angle over the draft of it, so I could say like something like, five. And notice it's going to push that out just a little bit more, because of the five degree draft that I'm adding to it. So a couple things you can do there. We also have the option to use Guide Curve. Now guide curves are sketches that define the outside profile, when you're transitioning from one sketch to the next in the Loft feature. We're not going to be doing that in this example, but I do want to point out that that's available. So now that is the basic example of how to use a Loft feature and some of these starting and ending constraints. We also can add that same thing over here, like Normal To Profile, and we can adjust it like that. Okay, click okay, when you're done. Let's grab that next example. Over here, we've lofted from a square into a six-sided shape up here. So we got a hexagon at the top. And notice it doesn't line up perfectly. You got this one big face over here, you got a big face over here, and then this face here is split, and this face over here is split, and it's not even, right? So, one of the main things you got to focus on when you're creating lofts is that both of the shapes have the same amount of points, that way you can connect a point to a point. So let me show you how to fix this common problem. So let's go ahead and actually just delete this feature altogether, get rid of the loft. Then come down here to my original sketch. Now, the top shape has six sides. We need to turn this shape here into a six-sided shape as well. And I can do that pretty easily, which by clicking on these outside lines here. And I can say these lines, I'd actually like to have them, so they're construction. Right, and let's go back and look at our other shapes. So, notice this point here, we want to connect over here, and this point here, we want to connect over here. So that's what we're trying to modify here. So now, what I want to do is I'm going to create a center line, and I'm going to snap from this point all the way over to here. And, there's a couple of different ways we could do this, but this is a pretty straightforward. Just make a couple of lines on each side here that are going to be on top of the existing lines. So, now these are individual line segments, so here's that segment there, here's that segment there. Now we still have a square, right, but it's made up of individual line segments that make up six, and that's all we need. Exit out of that. Now, when we go back over here, we're going to create that loft again. So I'm going to choose the Loft command. I'm going to go ahead and choose this initial shape, and then my final shape. And then notice they connect together. However, it's still twisting, and that's not what I want, so, what I need to do is grab this little green dot here, and instead of there, I want to connect it over here. So you could rotate that around if you want to, but now, we have what we want, right? We have a symmetrical shape. It's splitting both sides here correctly, and it's looking pretty good. All right, click okay, and there is our new modified shape. So just remember, you just want to make the same amount of segments on each section, or each profile, of your lofted shape. All right, my last example here, is a three profile loft. Notice I've already done a little bit of work ahead of time, so I've got this shape at the bottom, and it has six sides. Over here, we also have six sides, and then we have a circle, and I've taken that circle, and I've divided it up into individual little segments, so that each one of those can connect together. Okay, so let's go up here to the Loft command again. This time, as far as my Profiles, I'm going to start with the bottom one, then I'm going to go over here to the middle one, and notice that's rotating around. We don't want that to rotate like that, so let's pull that back over here. So we're fixing it as we go. And then we can add in that last one. Right, and whoa, we're getting some really wild things here. And hey, this might be what you want, right? I mean that is possible, that we could have a shape that looks like that. If you want to twist it, you can. But in this case, I didn't want to twist it, so I want to bring that back so you can grab those little control handles and spin them around, so they snap into these other points. And once you have it looking good, you can then, of course, click on the green check mark. Now, if you wanted to control the outside shape here a little differently, that's when you can add in those guide curves. And you might go ahead and do that at this point in time, by coming over here and starting a sketch, like something like on the front plane. So I'm going to come over here and click on a sketch, start a sketch, and now let's go ahead and change this over so we're looking at it just as a wire frame. So what I'm going to do here, is I'm going to create a Spline, that's going to snap, oh, let's grab it, there it is. There's our Spline command. We're going to snap from this bottom face here, and we're going to come up here, and snap there. So notice I'm not touching anything there, at all. But I do want to show these sketches, so I'm going to go over here and show them all, so you can see what we're connecting to. Now, I want to grab that point there, which is not connected right now. Okay, hold down Ctrl, and grab that line. And I want to say Pierce, so now those are touching. Same thing over here is I have this control handle here, I want to grab that point, and I want to pierce it into that sketch, so they're touching. And then finally up here, I want to grab that line, and the endpoint, again, and I want to pierce that together. So now I have a line controlling the outside shape. Now this might not be exactly the profile you wanted, but you can also grab these little handles here, and modify things to make your outside shape, look a little different. Now we can have one guide curve, or we can have 100. It doesn't really matter, you can have as many guide curves as you'd like to put into your design. So let's go ahead and exit out of there. Now what I want to do is, because this sketch here is below my loft, I won't be able to use it. So what I need to do, is I need to delete the loft, and then recreate it with this guide curve. So, Features, come over here to Loft, my Profiles, I'm going to start down here. Profile number one, and then it's going to be, Profile number two. Let's fix that rotation issue again. Grab the point, right there. All right, and then the third shape. Again, fix the rotation issue, right there. And then let's jump over here into the guide curves, and the guide curve I want to use is this one right over here. And just that easily I was able to apply that guide curve to contour the shape the way I want, and then click on okay. And then finally, let's just go back and switch that back to our regular mode. So as you can see, the Loft command is very powerful, and there's a lot going on there. In fact, you can make these very, very intricate, complicated lofts with multiple, multiple profiles, and different guide curves, and really control that shape. But I definitely recommend that, you know, spend your time making the profiles and the guide curves, and that at the very last thing, go back and try to create the loft, 'cause it can also cause a lot of issues, because there's so much going on with this tool.

Contents