Posted by Jay Goldman on December 20, 1999 at 09:01:20:A number of students in my design class are having trouble using the lofting machine to create wiremeshed surfaces. They have been using the discussion group to trouble shoot, but they are still experiencing problems. The approach we have been using is to do a test run with a simplified drawing and then create station molds with higher numbers of vertices for lofting. The test run seems to work using station molds with 4 vertices. Students are creating one polyline and then duplicating and scaling to create the others, so the vertice number is the same for each frame (station mold). When they try the lofting machine with a slightly more complex station mold, 12 vertices they get error messages stating that their not using the same number of vertices.
The other problem they are experiencing is that on a few occasions when the lofting machine did send back a file the mesh was segmented in nature, not a smooth transition from one station mold to the next. I believe the students have e-mailed the specific files to you. Do you have any idea on why they are getting these results. A timely reply would be much appreciated as they have one more week to work on the project before their break. Thank you Jay goldman