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How do you loft between curves in Blender. I am finding tutorials on the subject but they seem old and outdated. Is there a current way to do something like that? (In version 2.74)

NOTE: This is not a duplicate post because the answers that were posted are no longer valid. The CurveTools Plugin doesn't seem to work in version 2.74. Has it been replaced with something else?

Thomas Bricker
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    Curve tools doesn't seem to work anymore. I'm wondering if there is a replacement for it. – Thomas Bricker Apr 04 '15 at 13:50
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    You are right, I assume this is the latest version: https://sites.google.com/site/aleonserra/home/scripts/curve-tools. Get an invalid context error and lot more... @gandalf3 reopen it? – p2or Apr 04 '15 at 21:05
  • If you don't mind converting the curves to a mesh, then you can use the bridge tool. Also related: blender.stackexchange.com/q/1503/599 – – gandalf3 Apr 05 '15 at 06:15
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    does this help ? http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/8585/why-can-i-not-use-the-make-segments-command-on-my-surface-nurbs-curves/8587#8587 – zeffii Apr 05 '15 at 07:59

1 Answers1

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Blender is primarily a polygon based modelling tool. Curves have received some attention over the years and are quite acceptable as modelling devices now. However Lofting, which creates surfaces from Curves (or potentially NURBS) is, if we are honest, a little bit of a Fiasco, still in 2015. Those of us who want that functionality seem to be in quite a minority, else it stands to reason that these features would be much better supported.

The power of the Bridge Tool and the CurveTools addon shouldn't be underestimated. From what I can tell CurveTools is still semi-actively under development.

Your question is, "how would you loft between curves"? I use Sverchok (Node based geometry addon for Blender). enter image description here

While the example image shows three splines which are part of the one curve, this is to illustrate only the control points of the splines. For this to work in Sverchok you

  • have any number of separate curves
  • their names are important for sorting
  • the origin of all the curves should be the same, the geometry of the curves themselves is of course entirely up to you.
  • with the curves selected, press the Get Selection button on the Objects-in node , and hook up the nodes something like the image shows.

For live updates you need to scrub the timeline or have it playing, it's a bit of a hack.. but it gets the job done.

enter image description here

zeffii
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