Tech Tip: How to Create Profiles and Guides with the Intersection Curve Feature

Today's Tech Tip focuses on how the Intersection Curve feature can be used to support profiles and guides.

Construction geometry, like profiles and guides, are commonly used to help control the shape of a loft or fill surface. To match continuity to adjacent faces, users either need to split the face of a surface to form an edge or use the Intersection command found in the Sketch toolbar.

But did you know intersecting curves can also be used to match continuity to adjacent faces? Let’s take a look.

Intersection Curve Feature

In this example, two guides need to be placed at the top and bottom of the model for a surface loft.

Area to apply Bridging Curves.

The Intersection Curve feature is used to intersect the front plane and the surfaces to form intersecting curves.

Intersection Curve feature: Surfaces and front plane.

Next, the Bridging Curves are constructed, one curve at the top and one at the bottom. These curves are constrained to the intersection curves created in the previous operation.

Bridging Curves applied to intersection curves.

Last, a loft is created using the Bridging Curves as guides while matching the appropriate continuity.

The Loft tool using Bridging Curves as guides.

Using intersecting curves allows us to reference adjacent faces without the need to split the face geometry.

Find out more by watching the video below:

To learn more about curves, check out the Understanding Curves self-paced course in the Onshape Learning Center.

Interested in learning more Onshape Tech Tips? You can review the most recent technical blogs here.