Geometry Fun with Onshape Loft

300x170Further exploring Onshape’s geometry tools, I started playing with the loft command. This command allows me to select two 2D shapes and Onshape will calculate a volume that spans the two shapes.

It is fairly limited in what it can extrapolate, the shapes need to be fairly similar for this to work. Circle to oval? OK. Circle to polygon? Problems.

I’m sure the feature is only designed to handle things like generate an adapter part to mate one shape to another. It’s not for artistic things. That is more in the domain of a 3D sculpting tool and not CAD.

Still, there’s some room for entertainment, especially since these lofted volumes can then be fed into the boolean operations tool. The picture above is one such result. The exterior of the shape is a square lofted with an identical square that has been rotated 45 degrees. The interior is a very similar operation, but the squares were rotated in the opposite direction. Subtracting one from the other results in the cut-out shape above. The corner of the inner square, rising in an opposite direction, cuts the edge of the outer square.

Not that this is functional or useful in any way, but it is a fun exploration of three dimensional geometries.

loft

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