Lofting is a term derived from the shipbuilding industry. As ship design evolved from craft to science, designers learned various ways to produce long curves on a flat surface. Generating and drawing such curves became a part of ship lofting; "lofting" means drawing full-sized patterns, so-called because it was often done in large, lightly constructed mezzanines or lofts above the factory floor. When aircraft design progressed beyond the stick-and-fabric boxes of its first decade of existence, the practice of lofting moved naturally into the aeronautical realm. As the storm clouds of World War II gathered in Europe, a US aircraft company, North American Aviation, took the practice into the purely mathematical realm. One of that war's outstanding warplanes, the North American P-51 Mustang, was designed using mathematical charts and tables rather than lofting tables. ( wikipedia)

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Lofting or complex surface design is important to all design whether it is a fairing on a hyper-sonic jet or the tab on a new bottle design. Surface design or lofting as it is called in heavy industry, is a dying art form. On today's CAD tools it is too easy for surfaces to be generated that might "look nice" but are mathematically a nightmare that will cause all kinds of downstream issues. There is alot of math and technique behind the creation of quality complex surfaces sometimes referred to as "Class A". Failure to recognize or understand these principles yields surfaces that cause downstream issues during design and manufacturing processes.

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Bayden Engineering Group is the leader in surface lofting services. True Lofting is a dying art form and we are unsurpassed at complex surface creation. The following is a list of some of the Lofting programs Bayden Engineering Group resources have been used on:

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