Fillet Improvements, Lofting, Also Thea Plugin?

 From:  Michael Gibson
3046.11 In reply to 3046.7 
Hi OSTexo,

> I have attached an example of what I am speaking about
> with loft. I would like the points to line up with the "X" on
> the circle, but cannot seem to make that happen. Refit gets
> closest. Thanks.

I see - but that is actually not a bug, it's more of a lack of "artifical intelligence" in MoI.

When you do a Loft between profiles that have a different number of segments in them (in this case 1 segment for the circle, and 4 segments for the end piece), MoI will do a kind of averaging process to merge the different shapes together.

MoI is not able to analyze the shapes to such an extent to realize exactly how different pieces should be mapped. You've got to help it by splitting things up into pieces so that there is a simple "1 to 1" segment matching.

Like Jamie mentions, you want to use Trim to split the circle up into pieces to enable this.

Once the circle is split, then you can either use Separate on the other piece and do the Lofts in pairs, or you can also use Edit/Join to join the circle together into 1 curve which will now have 4 segments inside of it, and then do one loft between each of the 4-segment pieces. When the loft sections have the same number of segments, they will get matched segment-to-segment.


But yes if you want to merge different shaped pieces together in a loft you will likely need to split things up so that you have more control over exactly what portions are being matched between the 2 profiles.

It would sort of take some kind of advanced artifical intelligence pattern matching to try and do that automatically, I don't have much hope of being able to produce that anytime soon... ;)

- Michael