Side tangency for surface lofts

Hi

Note that I'm asking about surface loft with guide curves (not solid loft):

Can anyone remember, in 2003, whether the adjacent faces for side tangency (outboard of the guide curves) were ever permitted to be surfaces? If so, which SP or SPs?

I'm doing a project which has to be done in 2003 SP3.1, and it only seems to accept solid faces. Seems weird for a surface loft.

I'm ALMOST sure it used to work.

(Some people say you get Alzheimer's from licking aluminium pots; I reckon you get it from solid modelling)

TIA

Andrew Troup

Reply to
Andrew Troup
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I'm getting new version burn out. I didn't think GC side tangency for surface loft came until 2004. Dunno. And of course you don't have the Fill in 2003(?), or the intersection curve.

Can you turn your loft 90 degrees so the end tangency comes off the old GCs? Or maybe just make temporary solids to assist the loft. 2003 had multibody.

You ought to charge your customer more to work in old forgotten versions where you have work around things that have been fixed long ago.

Reply to
matt

Thanks for that matt, your input is always helpful and thoughtful - Sorry to strain your memory so unfairly.

I built a study model to try to get to the bottom of why side tangency is not available to me in this situation. Turns out that GC side tangency for surface loft DOES work in my 2003 study model (built entirely from surfaces). The real model is one in which I've had to harvest surfaces from the face of a solid model built by the client, and I thought perhaps Side Tangency didn't work in mixed models, but when I added a solid to my study model, it didn't break the loft.

Actually 2003 does have Fill, and intersection curve, so I didn't have to resort to the right-angle turn (in any case, I wanted end control as well). There were only a couple of faces of the loft where the lack of side tangency was causing problems (inability to do a thin shell) so I deleted those faces and patched them with Fill and was away again. I do hate having to complicate the model with these arcane workarounds, particularly as my client has to run with the model as part of an assembly, but, hey, life would be boring if everything could always be done elegantly.

The only thing in later versions I really miss for this project (fairly complex sheetmetal deep-draw pressings, mixture of prismatic and flowing) is variable radius fillets for surfaces. I'm having to drop back into solids at various stages of the model for this reason alone, but it's a real pain that variable radius fillets also don't work for multibodies - I end up having to delete and recreate the same solid over and over to work around this.

Reply to
Andrew Troup

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