In today’s video, we’re going to check out Fusion 360’s Loft Tool. This tool is designed to help you create skins from profiles and rails that you have inside your models.

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This is a very powerful tool that can be used to create some pretty complex shapes.

In its simplest form, the loft tool basically takes two closed profiles and creates a skin across them. This is known as lofting. Basically, the program takes the two shapes and figures out mathematically how to fill the shape in.

This can be used by itself to create some fairly complex shapes. I’ve seen a lot of people use a number of simple shapes, like these circles, to create something far more complex. You can use either just multiple profiles, or you can also create a guide with lines, or in lofting terms – rails.

Let’s start with a simple shape – let’s say we wanted to loft a shape across these profiles. To do this, we’d click the little plus button and select our circles. Notice Fusion 360 automatically creates a shape that fits along these profiles.

You can also affect the way the shape is created by adding a direction. This can affect the strength of the loft effect from either shape.

Notice that your selection is going to affect your final shape. For example – you get a significantly different shape if you set all 3 profiles as your selection, as opposed to 2 profiles and a point. By selecting a point, you can make a lofted shape got to a point rather than being dictated by a sketch perimeter. One of the really helpful features in Fusion 360 is the ability to dictate the direction of your lofted faces using a rail. This is fairly simple – you just draw a line that connects the objects you want to loft that follows the path you’d like the loft to follow.

This can be used to create objects that follow paths with the centerline function, or you can use the “rails” feature to actually dictate the deformation of the shape edges. This is especially helpful for things like handles and other objects that have grooves you need to follow.