Creating variable chamfers with... a fillet? | Viewer Request #4 | Fusion 360 Tutorial

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel let's talk about relief cuts this is one of those areas in modeling guitars that seem so deceptively simple but ends up being a real frustration for a lot of people and myself included in part two of my guitars in fusion 360 series i went over some ways to approach this using solid lofting but not only is that process time consuming it requires a high degree of patience and discipline in your sketching process not to mention that it's difficult to make parametric for future design changes so i've been thinking about a faster easier and more parametric way to approach this challenge for an upcoming project i started thinking wouldn't it be nice if we had a variable chamfer i mean we have a variable fill it so why not a chamfer that is when the light bulb went off and i started prototyping an entirely different approach to these relief cuts instead of trying to sketch the cuts with arcs or splines why don't we just use the variable fillet to generate the curved edges that we need and then simply replace those surfaces with what we actually want well after about a month of working out the kinks with other viewers on facebook and discord i think i finally have it working so keep in mind we're in a bit of uncharted territory here so this could either be ridiculous or game-changing i'll let you decide so let's take a moment to understand how the variable fillet works and then we can apply it to a guitar so i've got two basic shapes here that roughly represent the different types of geometry that we'll be dealing with with this type of method so we'll have one shape that has natural starts and end points like a cube or anything that has a sharp point where it changes direction or we have the cylinder which is which could represent like a splined body where you have no natural start points and endpoints so i can go to the solid tab and say fill it or bring down the modify tab and go fill it make sure it's set from constant chord length etc but make sure you set it to variable and then if i click on the line that i want to apply this variable fill it to what it will do is it will give me a start point and an end point so right now my start point is over here and my end point is over here and you notice that it the start point position is zero and the endpoint position is one so by adding any additional points in between here let's say i add one halfway through it's 0.5 so this is kind of like a percentage but really what's happening happening is that it's interpolating like linear interpolation of a point along that trajectory and so the start would be zero the ending would be one and so i could say if i want to have one a quarter of the way through i could change this to 0.25 and that would be a quarter of the way through or i could change it to 0.75 and it would be a quarter of the way through but let's delete this one for the second and let's say our start point is 0 and we want that radius to be 0.5 so at 0 the radius is 0.5 and at 1 the radius is 0. that's what this is telling us right here so we could change the end radius so let's go like 1.5 so at the start it's at the start of zero it's 0.5 and at the ending it's 1.5 but we can add lines in the middle so let's click halfway through and that gives us 0.5 and we could change this to zero if we'd like to so it'll basically morph the radius from the start point which is 0.5 to 0 and then it will reopen it and go to 1.5 at 1. i hope that makes sense it's a little confusing but let's delete these real quick go back to zero and this is more or less how we're going to be using this in our designs so we're going to add a point in the middle or wherever you choose to and we're going to change this to whatever demet whatever the depth we'd like our cut to go into the body on so i could say like 1.5 and so i have a 0 a 1.5 and a 0. and if i want to shorten that so that it's not all the way to the end i can add additional points so i could say here and here and those start out as zero so we're limiting our fill it to be within a very specific bounds so this will be zero this will be zero the one in the middle will be one point five this will be zero and this will be zero so effectively what we have done is we've created new start and end points and then we can hit okay and then we would then delete that face which i'll show you guys a little bit later so let's go ahead and apply this to the cylinder which is a little bit different but the same concept applies but when you select a cylinder i can select the entire chain and right now it has no start points and end points assigned because a cylinder has it doesn't know where on that circle you'd like it to be so the first point you click on that circle will be your natural start point and end point so if i click here this will be zero and one and then it will work its way around so if i come to the other side halfway through that's not an endpoint that is the midpoint so if i change this to 0.5 you can see that i have 0 to 0.5 back to zero and if i add another one let's say over here and over here this one you can see is you can see that it's going in this direction because point two is over here so let's change that to 0.25 so it's a quarter of the way through and let's change this one to 0.75 so it's three quarters of the way through so that way we have exactly like a cross and let's say i change this one to not that one we want to change the dimension of the radius to 0.5 and let's change this one to zero and we can come over here and change this one to 0.5 and hit ok and so basically we can do the same thing or we could add an additional point to further constrain where those apply so i could go like here and here and shorten up where those get applied at and then all we're going to do is go into the surface tab and delete these surfaces and then that gives us something that we can either patch or loft with our own um with our own rails or own surfaces that we'd like to apply so i could create a loft let's say from this line create a new profile to this line and we've created a perfect variable chamfer at a 45 degree angle that matches these contours and i can do the same thing over here and you can see that this one's a little offset so create a loft from here to here it does the same thing but what's cool is because we have surfaces to deal with we can apply continuity constraints to it so on profile one i could say i want that to be curvature and you can see it's going to morph it so that it it follows in the direction of the cylinder and if i changed both of them to curvature for example you'd kind of end up with another fillet but it still has to morph along with that shape and so you kind of end up with a fill it kind of like what you saw before so on this one we could do the same thing we could just delete that surface and then go create loft you can also do this with patch which i'll show you in a second but loft between this line and this line sorry delete that this line create a new profile and that line and you get a perfect 45 degree chamfer that follows that and again i could apply continuity constraints to one or both of them and there you go so last let me just show you how you can patch this it's the same concept then i can just go patch and it will highlight the whole thing and essentially do the same thing for me the only challenge here is that the patch tool doesn't give you quite as clean of results when it comes to continuity so if you want to change it to curvature i could say this side i want to be curvature and this side i want to be curvature i can still do that and it works pretty well but it doesn't always give you just as cleaner results as a loft does so if i stitch these together you can see that we've got the surface that we're looking for so that's kind of the fundamentals of how the variable fill it works so really what you guys came here for is to see how we can apply this to a guitar so if i switch back this is a simple guitar body that i've been working on for a project and no spoilers um you guys will see that in the upcoming months but let's apply some variable fillets to this to get some nice relief cuts so if i come up to the solid tab because right now i have a solid body i can go fill it and make sure it's set to variable and then i can select this outer contour now you'll notice that my start points and end points started where there is a sharp change in direction so i didn't get access to these inner cuts here but i do have access to this entire outer chain so that means these inner ones will have to be a separate fillet but this outer one can be a single fill it so i can then add points so let's say we want to do from the top of this curve to the bottom to the top of this curve so we'll do like right here and then add one kind of at the bottom and then another one at the top and then i can just change that so let's change that to like 0.625 and so now we've got essentially what we did on the circle earlier but we can still continue because our endpoint's over here so we can actually add more points to this so the bottom here and up here at the top of this apex here and another one at the bottom and then change this one to 0.625 as well and so now we have one on both sides i could also add one you know over here and go 0.625 as well if i'd like to i'm not going to do that in this case but what we can then just do is hit ok and then we can simply grab these two surfaces go over to the surface tab and hit delete and once we do that now we have again something that we can patch or loft together so let's go loft between this surface hit the plus sign it doesn't seem to like just clicking the next one because it detects it as part of the same chain so hit a new profile to this one and hit ok and so there you go you have a simple little relief cut and so then all you would do to complete this is do another one between these two right here hit the plus sign do the next one hit okay and then if you if that's all you wanted to do you could then just select the whole thing stitch it together and you've got these contour cuts and we did that in like two minutes super simple super fast way to do this there is one big downside to it which we'll go into and more into in a minute but that it only allows you to apply a 45 degree angle so that can be a challenge so let's let's section view this so you can see exactly what i'm talking about so let's go here let's bring this back to where we have those cuts let's kind of find the deepest parts of them you can see that those cuts are at a perfect 45 degree angle so the method as i'm showing you right now only applies if you're willing to have a 45 degree cut it won't apply for those shallow on the sides but deep into the body kind of relief cuts there is a work around for that which i'll show you guys in a moment but this is easily the fastest way i've ever been able to find to produce something like this and what's amazing is it's still parametric so i can come back in to the fillet command and change these locations or change the sizes so i can come back here and say one inch and let's say click this one and type one inch as well and i could let's say i want this to wrap a bit more around the back side so i could change this point right here and change its location so this is our start point or is this our endpoint that's our end point so right now we're at point seven along this line so i need to go smaller so i could say point six and you can see it wrapped it around the back and i could say okay and it still works and so i'm able to go back to the other one let's say and let's change that one as well so this one we need to make larger because we're working our way around so let's try like 0.45 that's a little bit not far enough so let's go 0.46 that's pretty close and you can see we have these cuts all the way around now you can also do the same thing on these cutaways so let's go back to our solid tab well actually first what we need to do is okay never mind theoretically what you would do is you would do that before you delete these surfaces so let's go ahead and roll our timeline back to before we deleted those surfaces and let's go back to our solid tab and apply two more fillets one on this contour and one on this contour so i'll select this line right here and our start point is here and our end point is here so where do we want the deepest part of this fill it to be so you might want it to be straight down or maybe you want it to be kind of more over here so let's select that and let's go 0.625 that's looking pretty good it might need to come over a little bit more so let's just move that to 0.5 that's looking a little bit better and hit ok and let's apply another one to right here and this is going to be our endpoint this is our start point and let's say this one we want to be a little bit more in the depth right here so we'll do like right there and do 0.625 as well and maybe we want to move it a little bit more back so let's go point 2 like that that looks pretty good and so theoretically you would do all of this first and then start deleting your surfaces so in this delete feature i can add these as well hit ok and then we would just patch or loft those together as well so let's go surface in this case let's just patch them so patch that one and patch that one hit okay and then in the stitch let's make sure we have everything selected so let's delete that stitch come back and reapply it now everything's green hit ok and now we have a solid body with all the contours that we need to go ahead and make this guitar and then if you wanted to you could either do the same thing to the back side or you could mirror it over now in this case this is a little too deep so let's go back to this one right here and change the depth of this a little bit so let's go 0.625 to match the size of these ones up here so 0.625 and let's mirror those over instead of applying a new fillet so let's go create or construct midplane and we'll go between these two surfaces hit ok and then let's go solid create mirror from the objects we want are these two surfaces right here you could do all of them if you'd like but we'll just do these ones and we'll say across this mid plane and hit oh let's see if we can expand that hit okay and there you go so now you have the contour on both the back and the front and they're perfectly symmetrical with each other so let's take a second and talk about what if you didn't want a straight flat surface what if you wanted like a reverse fill it where it curves in like a scallop so we can do that too so all we have to do is go back before we lofted those and then we can create a plane so let's do offset plane from here and let's drag it roughly to where the top of that apex would be now you could define this in a sketch to get really precise on exactly where you wanted it to be but let's go ahead and hit ok on that and let's show that plane so we have a plane right there and then we can sketch on that plane and project in let's say these two lines right here so go create project include intersect and it will give you the two points at where that sketch intersects that plane or not that sketch where these faces intersect that plane so we just hit okay and then what we could do is we could create like an arc between these two like that and we could give that arc in a dimension so let's say 0.5 inches now we can just use that as a rail for our loft if we'd like so let's go back and let's go back to this loft right here and let's add that as a rail so bring back our sketches and we'll say rail right here let's hide our sketches hit ok and so now you can see that instead of having a outward fill it or a flat surface i can actually scallop the inside of that entire contour and if you wanted to you could vary this curvature significantly so you could do like a scallop to a flat to a scallop or vice versa and you can control this however you want at this point with a rail so it's very cool that we get so much control off such a unique and simple method for this so what if you didn't want to have a perfect 45 degree angle right because this is for that's a pretty limiting constraint to only have a 45 degree chamfer what if you wanted something much shallower on the sides but something much deeper into the body well you can also do that too but you have to basically apply two separate sets of fillets so that way we can control the depth of each and then stitch them together so let me show you how to do that so we're to do is we're going to delete everything up to let's go back in fact let's delete all these fillets and we're going to start from here so we will do in fact actually let's undo that real quick and let's do everything except for that first fill it which is this one right here so this can define our first one and let's change these to be significantly deeper so let's go like 1.5 inches in right something pretty far on the top side but we don't care about what's happening on the side at the moment we're just trying to define how deep into the body this fillet is going to go and so on this one let's do the same thing 1.5 and then hit ok and then what we're going to do is we're going to go into the surface tab and not just delete these faces we're also going to delete these side faces as well because we don't want this curve that's going along the bottom to carry into the next steps that we're going to be performing so we don't need to delete anything on these front faces just the sides and the fillet faces so we're going to be left with this now this is obviously pretty ugly at the moment so now we can extrude this outer contour back up to give us another flat face to work with so we can say to object let's go to like this point right here and hit ok and now what we need to do is we need to close off this boundary so that we can delete this face and apply the new fillet that we want so what we're going to do is we're going to stitch all this together as is right now even though there's a red line right here that's okay because what that will allow us to do is it will allow us to patch these contours flat for the time being so we'll click ok and then we'll patch this contour right here as well and then now we can delete this face and still retain the line that we created so that's why we patched these is so that way when we delete this face we still retain that curvature now we need to do is go ahead and stitch this together because you can't apply a fillet in the surface tab unless you have a single body you can't apply it between two separate bodies so let's stitch this together and so now this edge is considered part of the same body as this one so now we can apply the fillet again but this time under the surface tab so let's do fill it and make sure it's set to variable and what's cool is now it's detecting our start and end points from where we had it before so we can select this edge and this end point or this start point in this endpoint is the same start and end point as the one we defined earlier and so then we could let's say draw a point right here kind of in the center and let's define that as something smaller so let's go like .375 and hit okay and then we'll do the same thing to the other side so let's go fill it now we have to do these separately because these are now split chains that's not all one chain going around the end like it was before so we have to do these separately let's select that one and let's select the apex here as well roughly where the other one was and let's do 0.375 on that one as well now what we have is we have the curvature on the side that's significantly shallower but we also have the line that we need for the curvature on the top so all we need to do now is patch this inner contour right here and then delete these faces and now we're essentially where we were before so we can just delete these faces like that and then loft them together so now i can hit loft and select this chain hit the plus sign and select this chain now you'll notice there is a couple different line segments over here so you have to make sure you select everything so come into this side and select these ones as well and hit ok and so now we have a shallow contour so it's only 0.375 down but by 1.5 inches into the body and so let's do the same thing on the other side create loft from this contour to this one and make sure we grab any remaining little arcs on the ends and then hit ok and then in theory we should be able to just stitch these together yep everything is green hit ok and now we have a solid body so let's try it like what we did before where we added a rail to the inside to turn it more into a scallop so let's create a construction plane so plane or offset plane from here and let's drag it roughly to the apex of that curve again so roughly right there and let's sketch on that surface or that plane and then we can project in these two lines just like we did before so we'll go create project include intersect and again it'll give us the two points of where that sketch intersects or that surface intersects the plane hit okay and actually i'm sorry we need to do this before these lofts so drag our timeline back let's delete that plane and let's create a plane here my apologies so let's go offset plane from here let's try to get this lined up as best we can right about there and sketch on that tied our bodies so we can actually see it there we go and then project these in so select those create project include intersect hit okay and let's create an arc between here and here let's give it something pretty shallow so we'll do like two inches just to give it a little bit of inward curvature in fact why don't we do it this way instead let's delete that and let's draw a line coming out horizontally that connects to this and then we'll make this one vertical and then we'll just make these tangent so that way it's going to come out flat from this edge but curve up to this surface and let's make these construction lines hit okay and let's go back to that loft and add that as a rail so we'll go rail show our sketches and use that as a rail hit okay hide our sketches and now we have some inward curvatures so let's drag our stitch and everything back so we can see what our results are and so now you can see we have that little like scallop on the inside and if we wanted to we could apply a fillet here so let's do a let's do either constant or cord length and we'll select these two for example and go like 0.25 now it might not like that because i don't i'm not selecting everything else around it so let's try selecting all of these as well just make sure we go all the way to the ends okay that looks good and then let's try chord length because sometimes chord length works better on this type of stuff let's give it a second my computer is freezing i guess it's not liking that because we have like a little bit of a scallop here so you might have to apply you might have to do it a little bit differently let's try something smaller there we go i just didn't like the size of that fillet for some reason on that particular edge but there we go you can see we have a fillet here on all sides including the side with the more scalloped contour hit okay and let's change this let's apply some appearances here so we can see better what we're working with so let's go visual style shaded and let's apply like a wood color so we'll do like a real dark real dark color and let's go into the render environment and let's change this to top so we can see it a little bit better so there you go so you can see we have the scallop side and the flat side both look absolutely fantastic and this could be applied to so many different guitar types that i'm really really excited about the potential uses for this method i would like to give a shout out to matia and ben weiss from my discord and facebook groups who helped me a lot in developing this method because they had particular use cases that they wanted to use it on so mattia for example wanted to use it on a more prs style body or like a gibson um arch top kind of style and ben was trying to do it on more of a fender style and they were both able to have success with this method as well so and they helped me greatly in troubleshooting some of the common pain points and things like that so what i'd like you all to do is give this a shot because this could be the best way to do this possible or it could be more trouble than it's worth depending on the type of design you're dealing with but so far most models that i have tried this on i have had extremely good success with and i've the results i've gotten have just been absolutely great so i'm really happy with it i would say the one downside that we are seeing to this method is a little bit of lack of precision and what i mean by that so if we go back to the model what i mean by that is we're kind of just haphazardly placing points so in order to do this really well uh you probably have to create a sketch of the locations where you want those points to be and then assign them at those points in the fill it or do the math and figure out like how far along that path is that and then do the same on the other one so that way you can make sure that they all line up the way they should be so in summary what we managed to do is take one of the more complicated parts of guitar modeling and simplify it using tools in creative and unexpected ways with a few limitations this method allows us to perform relief cuts in a matter of minutes rather than hours so back to the question from the beginning is this method ridiculous or game changing let me know in the comments if you'd like to support my channel or download models featured in my videos you can find me on patreon.com forward slash austin shaner if you'd like to submit a request for this channel receive help on a project you're working on or contribute to the development of new workflows like this you can join our discord server links will be in the description below but thank you all for coming this is austin signing out

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 1,847

Keywords: Autodesk Fusion 360, CAD, CAD Modeling, CAM, CAM Basics, CNC, CNC Router, DIY, Fusion 360, Fusion 360 Beginner, Fusion 360 CAM, Fusion 360 CAM Guitars, Fusion 360 CAM Tutorial, Fusion 360 Tutorials, Guitars in Fusion 360, Tutorials, Xcarve, fusion 360 tutorial, Autodesk, splines, T-splines, B-splines, Bezier Curve, Sketch constraints, Sketching basics, Fusion 360 sketching, Variable Chamfer, Variable Fillet, Body Cuts, Relief Cuts, Belly Cuts, Cutaways, Guitar Body

Id: UZt-wV3qzxo

Length: 31min 46sec (1906 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021