Is there a good or fast way to create a "bellows" style loft?

[simian]

Is there a fast way to create a bellows style loft, like you'd find on an accordion or view camera? I've managed to make one using a loft, lots of cross sections, and the clone tool (in order to scale the cross sections), but this is very tedious to do. It looks like this, with the original loft superimposed as a semi-transparent object:


You can also look at the file (save it as "example.FCStd.xz" and decompress with unxz) if you'd like to take a look. Is there a better or faster way to do this? I'd like to do them with many more segments, but it becomes so labor intensive it's just not worth it.

[voskos]

If you need sharp creases use Part Design multi transform:
https://wiki.freecadweb.org/PartDesign_MultiTransform
EDIT: you need it to change shape, this will not work. My bad

[davidosterberg]

It could be accomplished by a custom macro. Create two lofts one for the inside and one for the outside. Then create a bunch of faces, that are perpendicular to the lofting axis, where you want the creces. Then compute the intersection to get all the wiresections. Then create the loft throught the intrersection. Voilà! Done. Of course this will be flexible and fast once you have it. But making it is a different story

[simian]

Alright, I'll look into writing a macro for it. Having not written one before, it's a bit daunting to do so, but I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.