How do you give lofted polygonal planes thickness?
 

Yet another weird question from the architecture student...

I've lofted some curves together, with the loft tool set to triangular polygons. Now I'm trying to give those planes thickness. I assume that it would involve some kind of extrude command, but I can't figure it out for the life of me. The only info I could find was for extruding individual faces, and since the geometry i fairly complex, that would be annoying. It's also problematic since I plan on building this thing on an RP machine and I need nice smooth planes, no weird gaps between extruded faces.

I will be very, very grateful to whoever solves the plane thickening mystery, it's driving me crazy!

I forgot to add the pictures!

And a wireframe view of why I don't really want to extrude every face individually unless I really, really have to...

You don't have to do it individually... you can select all planes and make sure that the extrusion options say to "keep faces together", "extrude", and things should work for you pretty nicely!

Sparticus

Thanks, Sparticus. I tried what you suggested, and got results, but it's still not quite what I'm looking for. I got some thickness, but the edges are still sharp, presumably because of the triangulation. What I'm looking for is more along the lines of every triangulated plane becoming a triangular prism with even thickness and then those triangular prisms being joined smoothly where they intersect one another. Any suggestions?

i think instead you could duplicate your 'across' curves, move them down, and do a loft between the 'across' curves, then do a loft for the 'up-and-down' curves on each side...

Heeeeey, that sounds pretty smart, NeoStrider. Makes sense... I'll have to combine the four planes for the RP machine to read it as a solid, but it should work out. Thanks!