Guitars in Fusion 360 | Part 2 - First Extrusions & Lofting Basics

hey guys my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel it has been a hot minute since we last talked i think it was like end of december or so when i made the last video and i don't know if you've watched the other video i had posted since kind of explaining the delay but long story short my wife and i got pregnant at the end of december and that really kind of derailed my endeavor in this project and so i also had to make a changing table slash dresser for our new baby and i have now completed that as you can see on the screen here i think it turned out amazing and i'm really excited and happy about it but that's not what you guys came here for you guys came here to see the next series of how to build a guitar in fusion 360. so let's go ahead and get started last time we left off with how to lay out your fretboard schematic which gave you a grid that you could base your design off of we went over how to draw a basic headstock and some of the little tricks you can use to help you design that quickly and make that easier to modify going into the future and we also kind of rush through how to design a guitar body just from a 2d profile and the whole point of that was that we wanted to get the 2d outline of our guitar in place and we were then going to use those foundational sketches to create 3d objects going forward and so what i'd really like to do is i'd like to mold the body a little bit today now i'm not going to go too far into the body because you kind of need to do this in a little bit of a sequence so if you were to let's say fully model the body all the way till the very end you might realize that the way you modeled that actually doesn't allow you to model the neck the way you want and so really what you actually want to do is just get enough of the body in place so that way you can model the neck and then once the neck is modeled and all your geometry that's connecting it to the body is in place then you can come in and do all of your like ergonomic reliefs and stylistic choices on the body i hope that makes sense so what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go ahead and do our first extrusion so what we want to do is we want to come up to extrude and then we want to select the body and this neck pocket if you're having trouble selecting that because it wants to toggle between the fretboard and that neck cavity you can just unselect the fretboard and that makes it easier to select and so we want to go ahead and extrude that the thickness the total thickness that we want the body to be so whether you want the whole body to be one inch thick or you know two inches thick if you really want a thick guitar or um i usually go about one and a half inches thick that seems to be pretty common in the industry it seems to be a pretty comfortable thickness to play um and so i just go ahead and extrude it one one and a half inches so type 1.5 hit enter and now we've got our first extrusion so it was as simple as that so now we've got our first 3d object so what we want to do now is immediately get the neck pocket in place so let's go ahead and hide the fretboard sketch and let's say okay i want this pocket and we want to extrude that down now here's a bit of a tricky spot already in designing the guitar is how deep should that neck pocket be um that really depends on the bridge that you're going to be using so if you're using like a standard like flat like hip shot bridge or something it's pretty typical to have like a 5 8 depth neck pocket that is going to make your fretboard sit a little bit higher if you plan on recessing your uh your bridge down into the body a little bit to get a bit of a lower action um you might want to go a little bit deeper with the neck pocket or if you're using like a gibson style bridge you might need to go actually quite a bit higher so what we can do is just i like to do 5 8 to start with and then if i need to adjust that later i can always come back and do and adjust that so 5 8 we extrude that into the body and now we've got our cut out so if we hide all of our sketches we've got the real rough outline so you can imagine if you were to actually build this you could just take a like a bandsaw or a router template or something and cut this out and this is basically what you'd be left with so now we've reached really the second major decision that we need to make with this guitar the first one was the neck pocket based kind of off the bridge that we'd like to use if you hopefully have an idea of which bridge you like to use but the second is do we want to have a simple filleted style guitar or do we want to have more of an ergonomic you know more organic shape to it now in the former if you want to have a simple filleted style guitar let me first explain what fill it means because some of you who are cad modeling or new to cad modeling may not be that familiar with it if you're more familiar with like let's say woodworking terms it's like a round over so what you can see here in this image is it takes it just puts a radius on all edges that you or corners that you select so if i hit fill it for example and i select all the edges that don't touch my neck pocket that's really important actually you can do it on this one but you don't want to do it on the back one so if i select all these edges let's say here like that and yep and that one we can apply like a quarter inch round over or fill it now what that does obviously is it just applies a radius around the corner it softens all those edges so it's more comfortable to play it's not square you know it's not doesn't have any sharp edges to it you can actually do that at this point contrary to what i said at the beginning where it gets a little tricky is depending on what you want to do with the neck so if you want to go ahead and have just a fill it on the neck like so like if you'd like to just have a fill it on the neck like that which is pretty common across bolt on necks you can just do that now however if you want to have like more of a unibody style where it's like got a nice smooth transition between the neck and the body you're going to want to save at least this back edge right here until later you probably could get away with doing everything else other than that but what's really nice about saving that edge for later is depending on how you how you want to model that pocket or not pocket that relief you could actually do one sweeping loft or cut through both the neck and the body at the same time to guarantee that they are perfectly tangent or flush with each other and that's what i believe if i remember right that i did on this one at first and then i came back and decided that no i want a little bit more of an edge there and it ended up turning out really well for me doing it this way but at one point i had it completely like the transition from here to here was straight there was no you know step vertical step so why did i just go through and explain that well the simple radiused slash filleted or roundover version like we were talking about that's really simple that's a very easy way to produce a good-looking guitar if you've already got the 2d outline and that that gets you a good portion of the way through the design right there where people really get stuck in fusion 360 or cad modeling in general because it's a difficult concept is when you have to introduce lofts or sweeps and really that's the [Music] that's the reason why i wanted to make this video or this video series to begin with is because once you start delving into that area you can produce amazing amazing designs but you have to have a really good foundation of how those tools work in order to be happy with actually using them because anybody who's tried lofting before knows that it can be infuriating sometimes so what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to take a little bit of a step back from designing the body and i'm going to show you guys some of the core principles of how sweeps and lofts work and then we're going to go ahead and then apply those that knowledge to the body so i'm going to go ahead and open a new design and let's talk about lofts so go ahead and create a sketch on any plane that you'd like and let's go ahead and draw a square so i'll go to rectangle center point rectangle and let's make these equal so let's do 1.5 inches grab that line i want that line equal to that line and hit finish so a standard extrusion like we did on the body would take whatever profile you want and extend it to the length that you tell it to where lofts really start to differ is it it extrudes between two shapes and those shapes can be different than each other so i'm not just extruding between one square at this point and another square you know three inches above that i'm extruding between two different shapes and in order to do that you have to have a shape on a different plane so if we open up the origin point here these are our planes we've got our x y and z or also like top front left plane for example what if i say i want a plane that's like the top one but three inches up from here so let's go ahead and hit offset plane so you go to construct offset plane we can select either this sketch or this reference plane here and we can say we want that to be three inches above that so now not only do i have a plane down here i've also got the same plane but three inches offset from this one so now what i can do is go ahead and sketch on that plane and let's say we want a circle we want a circle and let's say we want that to be one inch i'm going to hit finish so now not only do we have a square down below we have a circle three inches up so what a loft lets you do if you just do a really basic simple loft you can come up here instead of hitting extrude you can go create loft and the order here matters so you always want to start at one point and end on the other you don't want to select things in between so for example if you've got a square here a triangle here and a circle here you'd want to select them in that order or vice versa circle triangle square you wouldn't want to go triangle to circle to square because it's going to try to loft all the way around so if i just hit square and circle you can see what it's trying to do so it's trying to create a circle out of a square and it tries to find the mathematically easiest way to do that right so it's taking these four points from my start location and drawing them to four points just kind of arbitrarily decided but equal distance equidistant from each other on this circle now because there's no constraints i can actually grab those and move those around right so there's nothing locking that into place so if i move that over here you can see that that looks quite different than this side and so i can drag this one over to here and now we've got a flat spot whereas on the other one see this one we had a flat this one we have a curve so that's where it gets a little tricky with lofts so you can actually constrain how the loft interacts between those two shapes and to do that essentially what we're going to be doing is taking these lines right here and we're just going to draw them ourself so we're going to go ahead and preemptively draw those lines and force that square to follow that shape so if i go and hit cancel i need to draw a line from this corner up to that circle and one from this corner to that circle this corner to that circle that corner to that circle as well so the easiest way to do that is you can go construct plane at angle or offset plane however you want to do this and you can do tangent plane if you have if you're drawing on the outside of a circle or a sphere or cylinder or something and go plane at angle and let's say we want that to be 90 degrees up from there so we're drawing a plane between these two points if i hit okay now i can sketch on that plane so now let me go ahead and sketch on that plane and now we can actually bring in just like the um in the schematic example from the previous episode we can bring in the dimensions from these previous sketches so we have something to lock onto so what i can do is i can let's say click this outside point and this outside point hit p on my keyboard to project and we can project that into this sketch plane so what i can then do is also grab the circle since there's no points to grab on that i can just grab the whole circle and hit p for project hit enter and it will take what you actually see right here and project that onto your sketch so if i hide the other two sketches it's only bringing in what is visible from that plane and so now i have two points that i can connect so for example i can do an arc let's say from here to here or i could do let's say another arc but i could go let's say the opposite direction and if i go ahead and hit finish now normally you'd give these dimensions but if i hit finish and i go ahead and re-loft this and i say i want to go from this square to this circle it's going to try to do the automatic version first and then you have right here what's called rails or guide type the regular rails means you're connecting any point on your sketch to another point on the other sketch and that can be any point you want um so it could be this one to that one or this one to that one it doesn't matter center line sketch takes the not necessarily the origin point but the center of that sketch and i connect those two so i could draw a line from here you know up to that line and it would make the whole square follow that as well but we're going to use regular guide rails for now and let's go ahead and select guide rail add guide rail select that one and you can see it's already making it follow that curve and let's say well i want this one to come out more so let's select this other one and let's go ahead and hit okay so now what it's doing is it's taking that square and these other two or these two that we just drew sketch lines for are following those curves precisely so if i look at my sketch you can see that the profile of that extrusion is following that but if i look at the other side from this angle it's still that perfect shape but what you don't see is everything else had to morph along with it in order to to keep its relative location to each other so that's roughly how lofts work now something that really gets tricky with guitars is that often times for every single point that you have on your original sketch you'll want to have an equal number of points on the other sketch right and that's not always the case but it makes your life a whole lot easier so let me show you an example now if i wanted to actually constrain the two lines that we didn't sketch right because right now these are still movable and not defined i would need to create two other points right somewhere on that circle in order to connect those two otherwise it's going to grab wherever it wants to grab and that can be a big problem because sometimes if you have a nice smooth curve sometimes those lines that it's automatically trying to create creates a big harsh crease in your design and so it's really important to think about okay my base shape that i'm coming from has four points i need to if i want to fully define this i'm going to need to have four points on the next sketch that i'm going to define so what we can actually do in the case of this circle is add four more points just like we did with the other one so if i hide the body here and let's go ahead and hide this sketch bring these two back what i can do is do the same thing we did on the other one playing an angle on this line 90 degrees hit ok and then we can sketch on that plane just like we did before project in the geometry so we have some points to connect to and now i can go ahead and define those as well so let's go ahead and do that and like that and we'll do this one here this one here and that's going to be real rough but you get the idea so if i go and hit finish so what i'm saying is i want this point to follow that line this point to follow that one this one to follow this one and this point to follow this line so it's going to create that shape so let me delete this loft that we did and let's do a new one so create loft i want to loft from this square to this circle and i want it to follow this line and this line like we did the first time but now i wanted to follow this line and this line and so now you can see that all four are constrained if i hit ok you can see that there's still some creases here so if we wanted it like perfectly smooth we'd have to then further define those lines but all four points have a defined trajectory let's say that i've given it so how do you apply this to a guitar as that's really what this comes down to what when we do some of these like recessed cuts on the back of the guitar right let me go to my other design here i'll show you what i did so i failed to mention unfortunately that you don't just have to extrude you can also use this to cut that shape into another shape right so i'll just do this real quickly i apologize so if i wanted to let's say cut from a smaller circle let's say 0.375 to a smaller square so let's go ahead and hit finish sketch on this square and let's do another square rectangle there we go and let's do half an inch 0.5 make those equal now what i can actually do is loft a cut between those two as well so i can hit let's get rid of these other sketches i want to say i want to loft from this square so create loft from this profile to that profile and now you can see it's actually doing the same thing it was before but it's actually cutting into that shape that's where a lot of this in guitar comes into because what we've done is we've created the body and now we're going to cut out those shapes so on my design i did exactly what i showed you here right i extruded it to you know just a 2d profile or 3d profile for that matter and then what i did was i created a triangle shape here so like from here to here and i had that cut all the way through and i used these as as lines in order to do that here's a better way to show you i'm rambling a little bit so if i pull up this loft feature that i used on this what i did was my first profile was actually over here it was a triangle from here to here and then i had another triangle way the hell over here and what i did was i drew a line can on the same plane connecting this point to that point and this point to that point and then all i had to do for the bottom one was just project in the line from my original master sketch to a plane at that height and then i was able to use those as my guide rails so you can see i went from a triangle and then each point has to follow this line that i've attached it to and hit ok and you're able to get a relief cut if the computer ever decides to load all right i'm back and the computer is loaded let's go ahead and try to do that on the body that we've just drawn and then maybe we'll call it for a day and then move on to episode three so let's go and delete our billet that we did much earlier and we're going to go ahead and cut a the curve that i just showed you but we'll do it from here to here so where do you start so in this case i would probably actually start by drawing the guide rails first because then it gives me a definitive point to where i can draw my profile sketches to so if i go ahead and hit create sketch and let's sketch on the top plane of this guitar let's go ahead and project in this top edge and let's go ahead and draw an arc let's say from here to here and here to here now you could do that and then define like the angles and stuff but what actually i found can of sometimes be really much easier is to take that line you've just projected and come up here and hit offset now if you hit offset what it's going to do is it's going to create you a perfect version of that but it's going to keep it concentrate all the circles concentric and it's going to make it smaller so you can see what it's doing here so what that's going to do for me is if i want if i want that to be like a perfect triangle all the way around i can just offset that and if i hit okay now i've got a dimensioned line that i can then you know draw from like you know here to here here to here and that would give me a nice cutting profile um i didn't do that in my design but i think that's going to be the easiest way to show you i did the previous version where i drew a custom arc so it was a larger radius here and a smaller radius here etc so let's go ahead and do it this way so let's go ahead and hit finish sketch so now we've already got two of our guide rails right here this this one right here and this one right here so really what we need is we need our third point so let's go ahead and construct one more plane but let's do a mid plane right now i'm just going to do this for example um you can make this an offset plane that's you know a quarter an inch below or you can make it three quarters of inch below i'm just going to do it in the mid for an example so if i do a mid plane it's going to create a plane equidistant between these two surfaces so you can see it's right dead center in the middle if i hit ok and now what i can do is i can sketch on that plane so what i can do now is take that same line that i projected in and project that in to that plane right so all i do is select that line hit p on the keyboard enter and now i've projected that in so i've already that quickly given me given myself the guide rails so if i hide the body this is the profile i want to connect right and so i want to connect between this point this point and this point as a sketch and i want to create a point between these three as a sketch so you can actually create a plane between three points so if i go and hit construct through three points i select this one this one and that one and now i've got a plane to sketch on and if i come over here and do the same thing construct plane through three points between this one this one and that one i've got a plane to sketch on there so all i got to do now is sketch on that plane and connect those dots i clicked the wrong one sketch on that plane and let's go ahead and line from here to here to here to here delete that and what we want to do is connect make these two coincident and these two coincident and now it's already fully defined and so now i'm going to do the same thing over here let's go sketch on that plane and let's create a line let's just create three points here like that and go coincident to there and coincident from here to there okay so now i've basically modeled up what i would like it to chop out of that guitar so if i bring my body back in you can see here that i've got that basically my camera's doing some weird things hold on come on there we go okay sometimes it glitches like that a little so now what i can do is i can do a lofted cut so if i go create loft let me hide the body real quick i want to go from this triangle that triangle and i want my guide rails to be this one this one and that one now it's not wanting me to like that real quick so you can see it's only giving me two right now and you can see it's trying to like bend it so let me take off chain selection real quick and see if that fixes it there we go okay so now that's been fixed sometimes what happens is when you have a what it considers one line uh if it knows that these two are tangent it's going to try to consider it a single line but if you don't want to do that you want to select each individual segment you can uncheck chain selection and then select each individual segment and sometimes that fixes the result if i hit okay now what i've done is i've cut that triangle all the way through that body now you'll notice if i kind of come up here you can see a curve there so what is going on there right so if you wanted that to be like a perfect chamfer that might not be very desirable because now you've got this little like cusp sticking up and that ties into the point that i made earlier where sometimes what you need is actually an equal amount of points so you can see here that i've already got two points for my line segments it would be nice if i had a third that i connected it to so let's go ahead and go back before we did the loft and let's see if we can maybe fix that a little bit so let's go back to this sketch nope wrong sketch wrong one again there we go okay so we need to add a point there so let's go ahead and go create point on there that's going to be an easy way to anchor things so i'm going to hit finish so now what we want to do is show our sketches like that and we're going to create another triangle between there because somewhere in that somewhere in between this triangle and that triangle it got a little twisted so the more the more profiles you add the more complicated your loft but also the more accurate your loft will be so i want to do one more construct plane through three points like that okay little sketch here let's go ahead and draw a triangle make these coincident there hit okay and now let's go back to our loft so i'm going to drag the slider back open up my loft i'm going to delete all of these we're going to restart this so we want to go from hide the body we want to go from this triangle to this triangle to this triangle and we want to use this rail this rail and that rail now you can see it's not liking it again so i'm going to undo chain selection there you go it says it's missing this profile between here so i need to select that one too and now it's okay so if i open up my body hit ok you can see that that cusp i have a little bit of it right here right there because it's still trying to wrap around that curve but right at that point where we added it that cusp is now gone because it's forced into that triangular shape and so i was able to correct a lot of my mistakes because for every point that i had in my sketch i had a line or a profile connecting those and that's really where lofting becomes kind of tedious but it's important so really the big takeaway here is if you want to do you know a more complicated cut through your shape aloft is a great way to do that and in fact we're going to do a lot of lofts as we go through this series and so i wanted to take a little bit of extra time to explain that but the the key point here is you have sketch one and sketch two right at your basic level i mean you can have as many in between here as you want but ultimately you have your start sketch and your end sketch and if you're going to use guide rails every one of those rails has to connect from one point to another point on the uh on the other sketch if one is not connecting for any reason so let's say you tried to connect uh you drew your plane slightly off and it actually doesn't touch that point your loft will fail so the most important thing is if you use a guide rail each line must be connected from one point to another point between the sketches if they're not actually coincident or connected in any way your loft will fail now there is so much more i could go into about lofts and the different things you can do with them but i think this is enough for you to practice right so what i would do if i were you is i would you know open up i would open up a new document and start trying to loft play around do some cuts do some extrusions get a really good familiar grasp with creating planes and projecting in the lines and making sure they're all connected so that way you get successful lofts and when you feel confident that with that come back and check in on episode three where we're to actually take this idea to the next level and we're going to create some really nice contours on this body still again leaving this back section alone for now and once we get the majority of this body done we're going to start working on the neck so i really look forward to you guys coming to the next one i apologize that this video took so long to get out but i think it's going to be really rewarding for all of us and i think i've already learned a lot even just going back through my old file because i haven't really touched it in the past couple months and so um i need to re i need a refresher too so thank you very very much for coming i appreciate you guys i appreciate everybody who subscribed in the meantime um that video got way more attention than i thought it would it it may be a measly you know 1200 views but that that meant the world to me because i was expecting like 10 views so thank you guys and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 3,601

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

Id: goSEotCLLOY

Length: 35min 5sec (2105 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021