New to SW and Surfacing, please help.

Create planes that define the boundaries of the transitional area you want for the blend.

Use these planes to "trim surface" to basically delete all the surfaces between the planes.

Then you can create a boundary surface.

Don't worry about direction 2, just select the starting edge in direction 1, then the opposite edge for direction 1.  You will probably have to move around the connectors to get the "flow" of the transition how you like it.  Select on each of the edges in the feature manager, you will see a drop-box below the selection area for how you want it to transition. This will be set to "none" initially, and will give you different tangent options. For a nice smooth transition, make sure this is set to "curvature continuous" for both edges.

Keith,

My usual advice for someone who is just getting started in surfacing is to buy Matt Lombard's book, SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible, but since you are running the free trial, maybe that's not your cup of tea. (Although it isn't very expensive.) My other usual bit of advice is to work your way through Ed Eaton's Curvy Stuff tutorials at < http://www.dimontegroup.com/ >. Ed hasn't been making them lately, so they are a bit out of date on the latest user interface and features like Boundary Surfaces, but they are a great way to learn the basics.

Deciding where to "cut" your revolved surface to make the transition to the loft is the hardest part for someone like me (an ME, not an ID). As the others said, a Boundary Surface is a good possibility for the transition. Fill Surfaces sometimes work very well for transitions as well. You might want to break it up into several surfaces.

Jerry Steiger

Inventor does surfaces also

work your way through JD Mather's tutorials on surfacing, he's pretty good at explaining and has good tips to build a bulletproof model.

http://home.pct.edu/~jmather/content/DSG322/SolidWorks_surface_tutorials.htm