CompuServe Messages

Gary: -well, yes, I think you missed what my problem was, but it may be related. I was trying to loft a shape (simple thin rectangle) along a path which was three dimensional. Namely, an oval "racetrack". The rectangle lofted in an oval with banking "off" in 3ds.set worked fine. Then when I tried to twist the path mercilessly so that one of the straightaways in the oval had a vertical "hot wheels" type look, I got 180 degree flips at the far right and far left ends of my oval track. I don't know if I am explaining this properly, but the other thing I noticed was that the track did not meet itself normally at the "beginning-ending" point (it was supposed to be a closed path. I created the path in the 2d shaper as an oval with an internal loop, then twisted the internal loop 90 degrees in the lofter. It would have been easier if we had something like the 3D editor to manipulate paths. To be honest, I haven't played around with it much, but one other suggestion was to look at the control point direction arrows. It gets to confusing trying to see 3d arrows in 2d space. I think your analogy to the straight line that isn't really straight is about right on target. The problem is I don't want to "straighten path" …I want the loop, but not the 180 degree twists at each end of the oval! Lydell