Loft Generator Demystified: Introduction to the Loft Generator

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In this mini series, I’ll provide a detailed explanation of the Loft Generator. This great modelling Generator allow us to build meshes out of a series of splines by “morphing” between them and creating a skin. Mastering the Loft will give you modelling superpowers, and allow you to build procedural models that are flexible, yet easy to set up.

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In this tutorial, I'll provide a detailed explanation of the Loft Generator, previously known as Loft Nurbs. The Loft Generator is one of four spline based generators inside Cinema 4D, which include the Lathe, Sweep, Extrude, and of course, Loft. They generally work by accepting spline objects as children in a specific configuration, and output a 3D mesh in return. The main upside of using generators for modeling, is that the setup retains a high degree of procedurality, and allows for changes with a minimum amount of effort. Let's take a look at the Loft's setup configuration. The Loft Generator needs at least one spline as a child in order to do anything useful. In that case, the result will be a flat surface in the shape of the spline. And in fact, that is the suggested way of creating flat 2D shapes from splines inside Cinema 4D. When using a single spline as an input, I advise you use a spline that lies on a single plane. Otherwise, the results will be rather odd. For instance, placing a helix under a Loft Generator will produce something fairly useless. Having said that, in a multi-spline configuration, you can use three-dimensional splines, although with a touch of common sense. Finally, in single-spline configuration, none of the parameters of the generator does anything except from the cap type in the Caps tab. We'll see this in detail in a bit. The input splines of a Loft Generator can be of any type, free form, primitive, generated, deformed, it can have a different number of points each, and even be a mix of open and closed splines. Because of this, the onus of figuring out how to morph between these profiles, bears on the Loft Generator's shoulders. Now that you're more familiar with the Loft Generator, in the next video, I will show you all the parameters in the Attributes Manager, by setting up a simple example.
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