Automating Sweep/Loft of profile curves

Those look like profile curves from Matrix…

When working with a set of profile curves, the absolute first thing I do is check my seams:

_CurveSeam Pause Natural

It’s important enough to have an Alias:

image

Every command has an Automatic or a Natural option for figuring out seam locations, but the automatic rules can vary from command to command. Natural is natural. Adjust your seam location, flip the directions to line up, and you’re good.

Plus with natural, if a surface is inside out, most times you can flip the direction of all your profiles and invert the normal. That’s important for _Flow pause pause TargetSurface for doing stone layouts. Using a target surface with _Flow is 100x better for stone layouts than using _FlowSrf. You’re working with linear distances rather than domain space mapping, there’s no UV skewing of prongs, etc.

I also don’t directly use polycrvs for profiles. Using simple crvs with Joincopy gives you so much more flexibility. I explained it to Holo yesterday, but I should probably record a video tutorial on it: