Help with loft using 3d curve

[pc-6]

Hello everyone,
I am having issues with the attached file. The design is one half of a cover for a small bottle. When I loft the 3 sketches without the guide curves, the loft will complete, however when I try it with the 3d guide curve it fails. This is not the first time I have had this problem and am not sure why. If someone out there recognizes the problem could you please enlighten me. I'm not sure if it is operator error or a common issue with Alibre as I am aware there are lots of bugs with the loft feature.
Thanks for any assistance with this.
Leif Scott

 

[bigseb]

Curves can be tricky. You have to exactly intersect each guide curve. For your purposes a 2D curve would have been fine so I recreated it. The points aren't 100% so you may want to clean it up but at least now it works.

 

[pc-6]

Sebastian,
Thank you for the input. Unfortunately I can not open the file as my version is just slightly older than yours, I have version 18.0.3.1842
I have never been able to create a 2d guide curve for this purpose, not sure if it is a bug or an error on my part, probably the latter. My solution has always been to make a 3d sketch. Regarding my original attempt I used nodes to ensure I intersected it perfectly. When I lofted using the global or local guide curve function it failed but when I used the Tangent selection it worked (of course this gave me an undesirable effect but I tried it for trouble shooting purposes) this proving to me that my guide curve intersected the sketches properly. I'm obviously not sure how to create the 2d sketch so that it intersects properly.

Leif

 

[bigseb]

As I said you can use a 2D sketch in your case. So select the plane for the sketch and click 'Sketch'. The click 'project to sketch' and select the three profile sketches. Project these as construction geometry. Now you can create your guide curve by snapping to projected construction sketches.

 

[pc-6]

Thanks for your help, it worked perfectly. Great to now know how to use 2d guide curves.