Loft Mesh
The Loft Mesh component is a tool for creating a mesh surface by "lofting" along a series of polylines. Unlike the standard Rhino loft, which typically produces NURBS surfaces, this component generates a mesh, making it ideal for performance-heavy ShapeDiver applications.
Inputs
Polylines (P) [List]: Supply a list of polylines that define the cross-sections of your desired mesh. Each point on the input polylines will directly become a mesh vertex. The component connects these vertices between the polyline "ribs" to form the mesh faces. Therefore, all polylines should have the same number of vertices to ensure a clean, predictable mesh topology.
Compute UV (UV) [Boolean]: Determines whether texture coordinates (UVs) are calculated and embedded into the resulting mesh.
True: Enables texturing and mapping.
False (Default): The mesh will be created without UV data.
Isometric UV (I) [Boolean]: Controls the "stretching" behaviour of the texture coordinates.
True: Maps UVs based on the actual physical lengths (cross and transversal) of the mesh. This helps maintain a constant texture scale even if the mesh segments vary in size.
False (Default): Maps UVs to a normalized [0, 1],[0, 1] domain, regardless of the physical dimensions.
UV Size (S) [Number]: Sets the size of the UV space, allowing you to control how many times a texture tiles across the lofted surface.
Outputs
Mesh (M) [Mesh]: The resulting lofted mesh geometry.
Best Practices
Alignment: Ensure the start points of your polylines are aligned. If one polyline is "seamed" at the top and the next is seamed at the side, the mesh will twist.
Point Count: You can use the Rebuild Curve or Divide Curve → Polyline components on your input curves before converting them to polylines to ensure consistent vertex counts.
Performance: Because meshes are computationally "cheaper" than NURBS, use this component instead of the standard Loft + Mesh conversion when building models for web configurators to reduce load times.
Examples
Mesh faces are formed by connecting the vertices of the polyline "ribs". Because the start points of these polylines are not vertically aligned, the resulting mesh exhibits a twisted topology. For a clean result, ensure all input polylines have an identical vertex count and aligned seams.
In comparison to the previous twisted example, the seams here are aligned. Because the start points of each pentagonal "rib" correspond vertically, the mesh edges flow directly from one polyline to the next without distortion.
Comparison between different Loft Mesh options
