Adding a scale deformation

We've got a basic loft, but this doesn't have very much finesse to it, it's not very aesthetic. What I really want to have is a really elegant taper to the thickness here and I want it to be larger at the bottom so that it won't be top-heavy. You might think that a good way to do that would be to add more circles as shapes along the path. However, that would not be an efficient way. Instead, I am going to use something called a scale deformation, which is built right into the loft.

I'll select that loft and go over to the Modify panel, and at the very bottom you will see Deformations. The only one we care about right now is the scale deformation and it's by far the most intuitive of all of them. To add that deformation, I'll click the Scale button, and now I've got a window opening up. You resize that window. What you are looking at here is a graph. On the left is the beginning of the path, and on the right is the end of the path.

The vertical dimension up and down is the scale of shapes as they travel down the path. I'll use the Zoom Region tool here just to zoom in on this area from 0 to 100%. And I'll grab this Move Control Point tool up here, grab one of these points and move it down, and you can see very clearly what it's doing. At the very beginning of the path, we've got a very small scale, a scale of in this case only about 6% or 7%, as shown by this numeric readout here.

If I want to restore it back to 100%, I can just type in 100. The dashed lines here that you see indicate the positions of shapes along the path and also of vertices along the path. What I need to do is add more control points to this red curve. To do that I can go up here to Insert Points. By default I'll get a Corner Point, but what I really want are Bezier Points. You'll notice there is a little triangle down here at the bottom of that icon that means it's a flyout.

If I hold that down, I can choose a different option. Here we go, insert Bezier Point, that's what I really want. And then when I click any where here I am creating a new Bezier Point. Let's create a couple of those. Then I'll go back to the Move Control Point tool and move these around to start shaping my model. Very cool! Let's say I wanted to sort of bubble out of the bottom here.

This is a corner point here, but what I really need then is a Bezier Corner because I want to have a handle that I can adjust. I can right-click on one of these control points and convert it, Bezier Corner, and then move that up. There we go, that's what I was trying to go for, I was trying to get this sort of larger base at the bottom. That's pretty easy, pretty straightforward stuff. You'll notice, by the way, that the handles are not of equal length. If that's a problem, then you can convert it to Corner, and then convert it back to Bezier that will equalize the lengths of the handles.

Maybe at the end I don't want it to be 100% in size and maybe I'll bring this down, and this is all nondestructive and I can go back and change this at any time. Examine that from different points of view. That's pretty good! There isn't much of that. I can zoom these out here so I can see the entire curve and I can use this hand to move around, and that's really all there is to it to creating a scale deformation to modulate the size of a shape as it travels down a loft path.