Note that one forward station and the four aft-most stations do not intersect all 4 waterlines. The intersection points are visible as the purple circles in the image below. This was repeated for each station offset plane. To make sure this would happen, I would select an offset plane and use Sketch -> Project / Include -> Intersect to create a set of points where the offset plane intersects with the waterlines. I learned early on that if I want to use the Loft operation with Rails, it is a requirement that every profile being lofted must intersect with every rail. I created fit point splines for each waterline, drawing each on the appropriate waterline offset plane. It is a mystery to me why Fusion 360 displays larger and larger planes the further each offset plane is from the origin. Next I created offset planes for each waterline (4 total) and each station line (15 total).

The canvases were positioned so that the world origin point was at intersection of the baseline, center line, and forward perpendicular. That put the images into the 3D world at the correct size.

To ensure correct scale, I calculated how large each image should be in the 3D environment, I created rectangles of the correct dimensions, then placed the canvases onto those rectangles. Then each plan was brought into Fusion 360 as a canvas, as shown below. I cropped each of the views and saved each to a separate file. I chose to use the Ernestina plans because they are very clean and accurate, requiring little extra work to make them usable. Thanks in advance for having a look.įor this exercise, I have used the plans of the schooner Ernestina, which can be freely downloaded from the Historic American Engineering Record at the following link: I am posting with the hope that individuals with more Fusion 360 than me can tell me if I'm headed in the right direction with my approach, and if so, how to proceed from here. I haven't been completely successful, which is why I titled this 'an attempt'.

I have been slowly learning Fusion 360 with a goal of accurately modeling a hull as a 3D object based on lines plans.

Loft function fusion 360