Guitars in Fusion 360 | Part 1 - Introduction & First Sketches

hello everybody my name is austin shainer and welcome to my channel so i'm going to be starting a series here on how to cad model a electric guitar in fusion 360. now just as a side note i'm an experienced designer i've been cad modeling for 15 years or more and i've been i've used just about any kind of cad modeling software out there and still even though i've done some really tough projects the humble guitar seems to really give me and a lot of other people a lot of troubles it's got a really complicated shape especially if you get a little more tricky with it and there's a lot there's a lot of technique that goes into it a lot of skill that you're going to have to learn with whatever software you're using in order to do that appropriately or cleanly for that matter what i'd like to go over is some of the lessons i've learned on my journey learning how to build an electric guitar in fusion 360. and i've i've certainly been where a lot of other people have been so this was for example my first guitar that i ever tried to model um this was roughly based off the tosin abbasi guitar from animals as leaders i really thought it was a really unique design that you just don't see out in the very commonly and so i tried to roughly mimic that but as soon as i started to you know dig into the details like some of these relief cuts and the pockets and fillets and all that it got hairy real quickly and then my model just wasn't working the way i anticipated um i've also tried to model based off of a picture um i thought this guitar looked amazing at one point and i still do for that matter and i wanted to model something like that and i started to but then i realized that i didn't know how to do this loft section and that was going to be really tricky so i dug in a little bit on this model and this was my second best attempt and i got really far into it but as you can see in some of these back sections i did like a big sweep cut here and everything just doesn't transition very nicely there's a lot of patched surfaces things that i couldn't figure out at the time how to do very cleanly um and so it left kind of a rough model and you can see here at the volute area the neck transition um it's better it's actually one of my better attempts at that but i basically just extruded that into this body and ran a fill it across it that actually works fairly well but if you're going to be seeing something see and seeing something precision you might want to go for something a little bit better so i'm going to start this series off by talking about how to lay out your design and then we're going to go into how to build the body how to build the neck how to construct all of these transitions between those two the differences between bolt-on guitars or sorry bolt-on necks and through necks etc or set necks for that matter and maybe how you would change your approaches for doing those different style models but this is go now i'll show you my current version uh this is the most recent model that i've been working on and as you can see let me change this real quick as you can see i've gotten much much cleaner in how i've approached these all of my transitions are smooth they're simple faces and rather than a bunch of patched surfaces big mostly big sweeping surfaces that cover those areas my neck transition has gotten a lot better still not perfect so you can still see a little hint of a line there i was planning on sanding that whenever i came to make it and just smoothing that out a little bit but i can show you how to get something like that that's got a pretty nice smooth transition so let's go ahead and let's start part one about planning out your design and i hope you guys enjoy the ride and i hope we both learned something and have a good time thanks so i've already gone ahead and opened up a new model um as you can see i've already sketched out what i would roughly like this guitar to look like this is actually a sketch copied from the previous one that i was just showing you but you may not have that obviously since you're just going to be starting this so where where do you start well everything on a guitar is really based around fret spacing right where where the strings land where the nuts land where the bridge lands where the actual fret wire goes the truss rod everything is based off of the strings and so what i've found that really helps me lay a good foundation for my cad model is to start with a sket a rough sketch of where your scale length and your frets are going to lie and that that actually gives you an added benefit of giving you a grid um in your sketch that actually helps you anchor a lot of your sketches to so that way you can let's say i want this the tip of this wing here to start at the 13th fret right and so you can actually anchor it to the 13th fret and guarantee that's where it's going to land so what i always recommend people do is when you're about to start modeling the guitar model your scale or your scale length and your fret so a really really helpful tool for this that i found um is fret fine 2d you can see up here this is the link i can go ahead and put that in the description below but what this lets you do is fine tune your design and it actually spits out a dxf or an svg file that you can then import into fusion 360. so i don't have time to go through this whole tool but essentially once you get the design you like and this can by the way can also handle fan frets once you get the scale length you like the space the string spacing all of that go ahead and export it as an svg or dxf and then you can come and insert dxf or svg right here and then once it's in there you can use that as your building block what i have found though is that svgs and dxf's in fusion 360 don't play very well with other sketches sometimes what i really like to do is import that and then use that as a reference for drawing my own um my own fretboard so for example oof some of my dimensions got a little screwed up um but you can see here what i've actually done is i didn't know these numbers i used that calculator to figure out what these numbers should be and i dropped in that model and then i went ahead and modeled this separately and what that actually allowed me to do is give me really good construction lines that fusion 360 recognizes so again what i'd recommend is you use that fret finder 2d you get your your design of your fretboard that you'd like import that infusio fusion 360 and then use the dimensions off of there to go ahead and redraw it and then anchor it to where you want i do recommend as well that when you're doing this you actually anchor the origin point to somewhere around the middle of the frets the reason why i say that is later on when you're modeling if your origin point is like way out here it's going to get really kind of tough to um to maneuver the model around because everything's going to center off of that whereas if you have it where i do in the middle the whole model tends to revolve around the center of gravity essentially of the model and so i would say when you draw that make sure your anchor points somewhere in the middle or closer to the body for that matter so now that we've got our foundation laid which is the fretboard now we can start taking into consideration what the headstock is going to look like and what the body is going to look like i personally again really like to draw out my whole design first before i extrude anything i don't mean necessarily you draw out all the different contours that you're going to be putting in there but the rough 2d outline of everything that i want go ahead and draw that out before you extrude anything so that way you can reference all of those sketches later on so let's go ahead and draw a headstock on this so i'm going to go and hit sketch and we'll come over here hit that plane and now you notice i can't actually sketch off of any of these points yet so what we got to do is we actually got to bring in some of those dimensions from that previous sketch so click on what you can do is click on the line where the nut is going to be hit the letter p on your keyboard which will bring out the project menu and then you can hit ok what that's going to do is it's going to bring that line from that fretboard sketch into our current sketch and if i change something in that fretboard sketch it will also update where this is located in this sketch so it's dynamic that way so now if i sketch now it actually recognizes that those points are there it gives me a midpoint an end point and an endpoint so what i'm going to go ahead and do is i'm just going to draw a rectangle like this so now we can go ahead and make these construction lines so click that come over here hit construction so those are not going to impact the dement or the how the body is going to extrude it's just going to help us with getting some of our dimensions in place so what i'm going to do is i know that i want this to be horizontal so i'm going to come over here hit horizontal and we don't know roughly what where we want how long we want this to be we just know we want these to extend straight out to give us something to base our headstock off of so in my particular design i'm using two curves but it can be really any design you want so i'm gonna come up to here to create arc three point arc and i'm just gonna start drawing arcs i will constrain them later on so i'm just going to click here here and drag you see that already gave me if i do this it gives me a tangent tangent constraint which says it's going to be tangent to that line and that's great so let's go ahead and do that let's go ahead and draw this one you can see it's the same thing it's now tangent to that line and so now as i draw this around it's anchoring that and making it tangent so i'm going to go ahead and hit here three-point arc again click this one i'm going to click this end point and i want it to be tangent to that so now this is tangent with this construction line that's why we built it we're going to do the same thing over here come over here but we're not going to click here because i want to create an arc from here to here so i'm going to click earlier on drag it over make it tangent to that line click and so now i have this but it's not anchored anywhere so i'm going to do one more arc i'm going to go from this point that we just drew in to this point that we just drew in and create a little bit of an arc now obviously this doesn't look very good yet we're going to go ahead and give this some dimensions so we know well in the case of me i know that i would like these two to be equal but i don't necessarily just want to hit equal yet because sometimes in fusion 360 if you just start hitting constraints things will go haywire really quickly so we know that we want this to be vertical with that now you can do a vertical constraint but i also like to have construction lines that i can later attach things to so i drew another construction line from here to here click on that and make that vertical now those are going to be perfect but now as you'll be able to see i can draw that up and down so what we want to do is draw one more construction line find the midpoint you see that triangle to this midpoint click here make that a construction line and make that horizontal so now that's perfectly symmetrical and it's going to move in the same same scale so now let's go ahead and give ourselves a rough dimension of what we would like this to be i'm just going to say 7 inches for now but we can change that later if we want and now we can start seeing this taking shape so i can move this like that move this over here and i can start getting a rough idea of what i'd like it to look like so i'm going to go ahead and define this i'm just going to pick a round number 1.5 and you can see this is also now constrained because these two were vertical i didn't need to do an equal constraint between the two and i actually don't need to define this arc either i could if i would like to but i know that i would like to just define the dimension between that line and that point and i'm just going to say three quarters of an inch so that's three quarters of an inch so now this one is fully locked in it can't move anymore and that's based off this length here so if i change this to six it's this stays put but that can go far go back to seven and then i now we just need to decide where this anchor point is gonna be so i'm just gonna keep everything pretty consistent and i'm gonna go from here to here it's 0.75 and so the only thing left is where is this arc sit what's the radius of this arc it's not tangent to anything yet so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to say i want this to be tangent to that construction line that we drew in the first step so come up here hit the tangent and now we've got our headstock so let me go ahead and exit that and there you go now you've got the neck and the headstock so now that we've got the headstock and the fretboard schematic essentially what we can go ahead and do is start working on the body now the body can take a little while to draw because especially if you don't know exactly what you'd like to draw so if you don't know exactly what you're trying to draw this could take a while and it can get a little squirrely so what you can do is just basically hit sketch just like we did before draw on there and then what i've found that really works really well for the body is to at the very first thing create a boundary box make it a construction line just like we did with the headstock and that way we know that we don't want the body to go beyond this point so that touches all the furthest points of the body what that'll do in conjunction with projecting in some of the lines from our fretboard is it will give us like before a bunch of anchor points that we can use so what i did here in my design is i just drew a bunch of series of arcs and made them tangent to each other so you can see that i gave myself a construction line here so that way i could dimension from the bottom of this valley to the tip and i made that a quarter of an inch and i made that i dimensioned that from the fretboard here so that way it locked it in place and then i drew one arc here tangent into this arc here so i did all of that in only two two lines and then i drew an arc here an arc here that went all the way from up here down here one at the bottom of this radius one that's swept all the way up where your leg rest is going to be down to here and then i needed an extra radius here in order to transition smoothly into this piece and then i tried to make this look roughly similar to the one up here and then i had to do two arcs here one smaller one larger and then i basically just picked which fret i would like this to come back into the fretboard on you can go really far back go really far forward it just depends on how you would like your guitar to play so that's going to be entirely up to you i would say definitely if it's a bolt-on neck give yourself a lot of room right here to bolt the to bolt the neck on you're going to want probably at least three if not four or more screws and maybe ferrules to bolt that neck on so make sure to give yourself plenty of room in this little section right here and then here i just did another set of curves made them tangent to each other made them tangent to here and then just connected the whole piece together i realize i kind of rushed through that with you guys but everybody's design is going to be unique but the big takeaways here are projecting lines from your schematic just start drawing a bunch of arcs well sorry first draw a boundary box of roughly the size you'd want start drawing a bunch of arcs get it roughly to where you want and then start adding a bunch of dimensions to get it fully constrained that's essentially what it is and that's going to take you probably a while to get to really fine tune the shape and contour of that guitar but really you're just looking for the outer profile what do you want that outer profile to look like if you want if you're trying to like mimic a strat or a telecaster or something you can always insert um a canvas or something like a picture to draw off of but i'd recommend just playing just start drawing start adding some constraints seeing what kind of cool designs you can come up with and then the end goal is every line should be black showing that it's fully constrained and when you are satisfied with that go ahead and close it out so now we've got our body our schematic for our fretboard and our headstock noticed we haven't actually extruded anything we don't have anything solid yet we just have a sketch you can imagine we're probably going to go with this but i'm going to project all of these lines that we've drawn so spend a lot of time getting these right and i'm going to project all of those lines onto our later surfaces and it will help me anchor everything else in the design so i would say spend the majority of your time trying to get this really dialed in to how you would like it to look from a front from a front view and then we can go from there so i'll see you in the next part

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 7,852

Keywords: Autodesk Fusion 360, CAD tutorial, Fusion 360, Fusion 360 Tutorial, Guitar, Luthier, cnc, cnc machine, cnc router, diy cnc, diy cnc router, fusion 360 CAM

Id: CtoyuhI64XI

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020