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I am using cinema and 3ds and I am amazed from Blender 2.8 UI upgrade and I am trying to switch to Blender.

As I am a newbie in Blender I am trying to do some lofting but I haven't found any tutorials on that.

Any ideas where to look?

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    $\begingroup$ Could you briefly explain what a loft tool does so we might be able to help find an equivalent? $\endgroup$
    – person132
    Apr 24, 2019 at 2:40
  • $\begingroup$ I guess what you're looking for is the curve bevel, you can find a lot of tutorials about this on youtube with these keywords, and on blenderstackexchange you have this page for example: blender.stackexchange.com/questions/58564/… $\endgroup$
    – moonboots
    Apr 24, 2019 at 6:56

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Bridge Edge Loops from the Ctrl E Edge menu is a pretty good lofting tool, with some limitations.

  • You can select multiple loops at a time.
  • It will loft meshes, not curves, and is only really satisfactory when the loops' vertex counts are the same.
  • You can make adjustments to the number of cuts, and interpolation, between loops
  • It's destructive.. you can't adjust later
  • If you want to loft along a curve, you would do that by hand, perhaps by assigning a 'Follow Curve' constraint to the profiles as separate objects before joining and bridging. See @batFINGER's answer here

enter image description here

Bsurfaces was a more flexible tool for lofting, IMO, but it's broken now. I would love to see it come back to life. If it doesn't, maybe if/when I get good enough at scripting, I'll give it a shot, in 2.8

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there is an addon called loop tools and it has a tool called loft not sure if thats what your'e looking for, it should already be installed you just need to enable it in the user preferences, don't forget to click save user preferences so that the addon remains enabled after you close blender

after installing. W > looptools > loft

enter image description here.

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  • $\begingroup$ That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you. $\endgroup$
    – BrainSlugs83
    Aug 30, 2020 at 1:33
  • $\begingroup$ I couldn't get this one to work properly on 2.93 as twisting one segment breaks the twisting of the other one, but I gave a try to the Bridge Edge Loops suggested by Robin and the result was exactly what I expected after I increased the number of cuts. I had never used BEL in this way before. It's great. $\endgroup$
    – ecv
    Oct 10, 2021 at 0:54
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If the loft you're talking about is similar to 3DS Max loft, then it's very similar in Blender, if you need to loft a shape using a path, and taper the resulting loft, then you need, three curves, one for the path, one for the shape (you can convert a mesh object to curve and vise versa) and one for the taper.
To do this, start with creating a curve (a Bezier curve for instance), then create the shape using another curve (a circle curve for instance) select the first curve (path), in the properties panel click the curve tab button, select the shape under Bevel.
For taper, you need a third shape to use as the taper curve, assign it the same as you assigned the bevel, except this one will be under Taper menu rather than Bevel.

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In addition to George's answer:

Using Blender 2.82 version. With 2 curves to create a LOFT SHAPE, I created as below.

Blender Loft Curve along shape

  1. Select the path to apply shape. In Curve properties tab, under Geometry tab, use circle shape under Bevel Object (Blender doc Reference)

blender curve properties

  1. Shape becomes

blender lofted shaped

  1. [Optional] If you need to taper the shape, you can create another curve, aligned along x axis and curved towards Y axis (As per your tapering) and add it.
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