Hi Michael,

Have been playing around with loft for ship hull creation as a way to build a complete hull with as few joins as possible. The current hull for my model of HMAS Sydney has lots of networked surfaces. This has mostly worked with quite a lot of tweaking but when rendered and on close inspection still has some visible seams between surfaces.

I started experimenting with a loft which stops at about the point where the rudder is, a difficult shape common to most ship hulls. From there I networked. Unfortunately, the networked sections are more visibly "not right" when examined next to the smooth lofted section. Next I tried an almost full hull length loft, stopping just short of the stern. This is almost exactly what I want but with a couple of problems.

The first attachment shows a loft on loose setting. In profile the shape is almost perfect with no strange divits or wobbles. Very nice. Unfortunately, in the second attachment you can see the same loft in the other plane doesn't match at the edges. The third shows similar issues at the stern. A question: Would it be possible to have a setting for loose lofting which forces the loft to maintain alignment with the loft's outer edges? Perhaps it mights be possible to select edges which loose loft must follow, sort of a "loose loft with exact profile"? That would be ideal for this.

Next I experimented with full length loft on "normal" setting. Fourth attachment shows a much better edge alignment with adjoining surfaces (though probably still not actually "joined"?). Unfortunately "normal" loft doesn't follow the desired profile as well (attachments 5 & 6).

My preference is to use loose loft. To do so requires rejigging of the other curves and resurfacing.

Sorry for the long post. I'm interested in everyone's thoughts on this, particularly if there is an option I've missed or a change to my workflow which would help.