To give you more control over the shape of your loft, you can add tangents to workplanes, profile elements, profile vertices, and part faces. Tangents give you the ability to pull the surface of your solid model in different directions.

Tangents are used during a loft operation to alter the design by putting more direction, or more tension, into the surface of your solid model. That is, a tangent is used to indicate that the surface being created should hug the tangent in the specified direction before it is allowed to assume its normal freeform shape. The more weight you give the tangent, the stronger is its pull.

You can also work with an automatically calculated tangent weight. This option provides a variable weight all around the loft. In many cases this results in a smoother shape and face transition than an explicitly specified tangent weight.

The example shows a simple loft without a tangent on the left, while a contour tangent is applied on the right.

Tangents must be added to profiles and parts before the loft operation is completed.

These tangents do not control the shape of 2D splines, they control the 3D surface as it connects profiles and/or parts.