Hi Everyone,

>Loft with Guide Rails<

Aside from Sweep, I'd of thought that even a simple Network would produce similar results?
Here's an example of the same set of curves, but one as a Sweep & the other as Network.
Only difference is that the Sweep version automatically produced Caps for both ends.

regard Colin

Hi Colin,

Show the points for both of the objects and note there is a difference.

Hi Colin,

> Aside from Sweep, I'd of thought that even a simple
> Network would produce similar results?

There are several kinds of cases where they can be very similar.

But they go about generating the surface in different ways.

Network kind of treats all the curves more equally - it's sort of like lofting in each direction and combining/averaging those into a single surface. The result is somewhat more equally influenced by all the curves combining together.

Sweep on the other hand actually slides the profiles along the rail curves, so there's kind of a more "rigidity" about the profile shapes since the profiles actually march along the rails in steps (while simultaneously morphing from one shape to another when there are multiple profiles).


Here's an example where you can see the difference a bit more:



Here's Network on it:



And here's a sweep (short pieces as profiles, long ones as rails):




Here you can get a bit of the feel that Network is somewhat more like a kind of membrane stretched between those curves (not totally but somewhat more like that), while with sweep the profile shape remains stronger since it is the piece that is more directly being copied and rotated around.

Of course also a big difference is that you can have a larger number of curves for Network.

- Michael

Hi Ralf, just another example here of how to do a "Loft with guide rails" (as I would understand it) inside of MoI.

Say we have these 3 sections:



Lofting them will give this result:




If you want to have more control over the "sides" of how the shape is formed, you can draw in some guide rails along the side direction like this:



Now you can select the circles there, and run Construct / Sweep, and pick the 2 guide rails as the sweep rails, and then they will become the guides that are used to generate the shape, it will produce this result:




So one thing to note is that there are 2 modes for Sweep: "One rail sweep", and "Two rail sweep", depending on if you have picked either one or rails at the stage in Sweep where it prompts you to pick the rails.

If you pick 2 rails for the sweep, doesn't that give you the "Loft with guide rails" that you are asking about?

- Michael