Guitars in Fusion 360 | Part 4 - The Infamous Headstock Transition.

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel we've reached part four of how to build a guitar in fusion 360. you'll notice though i'm not in fusion 360. and there's a very good reason for that because since my last video i have been preparing for this video and i have been furiously trying to perfect the headstock transition and i have not been able to do it it is still by far the hardest part of the guitar to model however i have gotten very very close and so i want to go ahead and show you guys some of the strategies i've used to get me really close to the perfect perfect headstock transition what actually helped me in the past couple weeks though is when i was really brain locked let's say trying to figure out the best way to do it sketching everything up um i just decided to 3d print some of the best attempts and that actually proved to be immensely valuable for me um this particular one was done with the patch tool which i'm going to be showing you guys today um but what this let me do is it let me actually get my hands on it and see what's going on what shapes do i have what does the cross sections look like etc i even cut a few apart to see okay do i have a parabolic curve there or do i have you know a perfect arc what's going on so i want to show you pros and cons of two methods that i've printed out but today we're going to go ahead and go over the fillet style which is definitely the easiest but has some drawbacks we have the patch tool which is definitely the most universal um to multiple different types of designs but it also has some drawbacks which we'll go into and i'm also going to show you lofting of course because that's what we do on this channel i will say though the lofting is by far the hardest you definitely have the most control but it's very hard to produce a loft or produce the rails for the loft when you don't already have the shape available and so you kind of it's a little bit of guesswork and kind of just figuring everything out so let's go ahead and start with actually let me grab that back what are we trying to accomplish with the headstock transition right so obviously we've got the neck coming from the body and we've got the headstock which unfortunately i don't have a printer large enough to print that on here um and then we've got in some cases of loot area which is basically both for ergonomics so you had hand has something to kind of hit but it also helps strengthen the headstock as well because you've got end grain and the wood sticking out here and it makes it less likely to snap so in general it's pretty common to believe that the loots are pretty necessary for guitars but there's definitely a lot of great guitars that don't have them so from a modeling perspective what challenges do we run into so the first thing that i would say is we're starting from a two point shape so one here one here you could have a center point here and a center point here but really you've got a two point shape trying to turn into a four point shape and so if you were to just say loft from this shape to this shape what would end up happening is these two points would come to these two points and then this point would grab arbitrarily somewhere along this line and create a direct straight line back and put a big crease right in the middle of it so that's problem number one problem number two is that the actual center line of it actually travels up and out and so that actually means we're going from a two point shape to a five point shape and so in order to actually get this fully defined we need to have five at minimum of five rails essentially in order to to get it defined so that presents a big problem because everywhere in between here is a shape that we don't know how to make right because it's it starts with this curve here and then warps into a straight line out here now you could imagine that you've got a you've got an arc that turns into a line so if you warped that line up that would give you the transition that you want the problem is is that it's this becomes a 3d sketch going arcing down here not only down but also over and forward and so it's traveling in three directions and that is very hard to do with 3d sketches in fusion 360. now you can do it with splines so you could do a 3d sketch from here to here and then constrain the i forget what they're called but basically the tangency lines you could constrain those a little bit but then once you let's say i make that parallel to this face well i can make that line as long as i want and if i make it longer then all of a sudden it distorts the shape and so i don't have a way to just draw from this point to that point or you know this point to the center of this without actually knowing the shape that i want ahead of time so that creates a big problem for us so what i tried to do when i printed off this this headstock transition was i tried to imagine what was the shape that this would turn into if it kept going right so if this line big let's look at it this way if this line went all the way up until it met this face what would that shape actually be so if you imagine again that this arc basically kept coming up then what maybe i could model that shape and then just cut this section out of it and that actually proved to be really helpful um i almost got it working but i still ran into the rail problem where okay well i don't know what that shape is supposed to be so i need to use what i think is the right rails and i always ended up with creases in my model so um what the patch tool does which is really cool is it takes basically a boundary line so let's say from here down around here up this curve back up and around right you can basically highlight the boundary and it will fill that boundary on a infinitely thin plane to whatever whatever is mathematically easiest to fill that sorry for stumbling on my words there it's kind of complicated to explain but basically you can just select the boundary and it does all the math for you which is amazing but there's a problem with that so what will happen is if you imagine let me grab a piece of paper here it's an old manual um so if i drew a line from point a to point b and i told it to stitch or patch in between there it would probably do something like that right because it doesn't know based on what i've given it that it wants it to be straight so it'll kind of dip it'll kind of like dip down in order to get tangent and so you actually still have to use rails um with the with the patch tool but you can still get really good results with it so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and switch to the computer soon and i'm going to show you the phillips style first because that is definitely the easiest and that will get most people where they want i'm going to then show you the patch tool and how you can approach that and then we'll start digging into the lofts okay so jumping into fusion 360. um i do want to say something before we start on the headstock um last episode we kind of left off on a little bit of an awkward note where i hadn't finished the body to neck transition since that time i have gone ahead and finished it as you can see here but don't worry before this episode's done i'm going to go back and show you exactly how i accomplished that but since we were just talking about the headstock let's go ahead and worry about that first so the first thing we're going to want to get in place is the neck profile close to the headstock so that way we can eventually loft between here but it gives us a good starting point for the headstock now where you place that neck profile sketch it kind of depends on where you want the peak of the volute to land so you do need some space between the peak of the volute and that neck profile you don't want those two touching um unless unless you're not using a volute then you wouldn't do that but if you're using a pollute you don't want them touching you want a little bit of space between them so if you want your volute the peak of your volute to land at the nut then i would put your neck profile sketch at your first fret if you want want it more like mine where it kind of sits a little bit further back then you can go ahead and put it at the nut so what i'm going to do is i'm going to put it at the nut so i'm going to go plane at angle right here 90 degrees and we're going to sketch on that plane okay let me hide the body real quick and hide this component okay so create arc now i'm going to just give myself an arc and i'm going to make that coincident to that point and coincide to that point and i'm going to project in that line so that we have a closed sketch and i wanted to mention the height so i'm going to draw a line here to from the midpoint to the center of the nut make it a construction line and then we'll just give that a dimension now i'm going to choose 0.6 because i know from experience modeling this that's what i want but if you don't know the height of what you'd like it to be then i would do a little bit of research on your truss rod and other similar style bodies or guitars that are going to use the same shape that you want and see what those neck profile dimensions are a lot of manufacturers have that kind of dimensions either on their website or you can do a quick google search and figure that out i know that i would like it to be 0.6 here keep in mind we're also going to have a quarter inch fret board sitting on top of that so it's not like that's going to be way too thin so i'm going to go ahead and close that sketch now what we could do is we could loft between here and here or the sketch right here so if i i could just go create loft and then make sure that it's following these and i could even add these as rails if i want to make sure that it's lining up but we don't actually have to do that right now what i'd like to do is go ahead and focus on getting the headstock modeled and then connect the two because what's happened to me in the past is if i did that first then occasionally the net the headstock transition might not come out the way you want so we're going to go ahead and do that first and now let's go ahead and take a look at the headstock so in the headstock sketch let's go back to our original master sketch now we're going to do the fillet style first like i mentioned and then we'll do the patch and then the lofting so in this case what we want to do is we want to draw the volute now what i really recommend is that you just do this in three arcs because it makes everything at least as far as i'm concerned everything a lot easier so you go three arcs like this and make sure those are tangent to that line between these two wing areas make sure all of these are tangent so this one and this one and you can go ahead and make these two vertical so that way it kind of centers itself up and now you can kind of see we can kind of figure out what the shape we'd like that the loot to look like do we want it to come to a pretty narrow point some people even do a straight point like that um or do we want it to be a bit more soft right so i generally like mine i lost my vertical here let me fix that so i like mine to be a little bit softer and sit a little bit further back so i'm going to do that let's give this a dimension of like 0.75 let's see where are we not constrained okay we need the dimension between here and here or here or we could also dimension these what i'm going to go ahead and do is make these two equal and then let's bring this back like one there we go that's roughly what i generally like um and that should work so let's go ahead oh we need to dimension this let's make these two equal and see if that solves it no my model's getting a little away from me here hold on from here to here make these two tangent make these two equal hmm okay i'm just going to redraw this real quick i apologize so let's go create arc from here to here make a tangent to that make this one tangent to that make these two vertical to each other and equal to each other make this one equal to that and now i just need to draw an arc between there so arc like that and then now i can just dimension it okay let's do 1.25 okay i'm not sure why that's not only constraining right now but that's okay we don't need it for what i'm about to show you so what i'm going to do is extrude this up so how high this is depends on how high you want from the fret or from the where the fretboard connects to the top of the volute so i know in my design i want it to be one inch but it could be whatever you want depending on your design so hit ok we'll extrude that up okay so now in order to run our fill it we can just sorry i didn't explain that i can just click this right here extrude that into the body and go join hit okay and now all we need to do is we just need to run a fillet across this so i can hit this line hit fill it start expanding it and you can see what's happening and the more i go right it's going to start warping this but that's okay now this might be a scenario where actually if in the fillet scenario i might i probably should have put my neck profile a little bit further back so let's actually go ahead and do that real quick what i'm going to do is i'm going to redefine this sketch plane here see if i can do that roll this back edit feature and i don't want to use that line i want to use this line okay go back to my sketch it's probably broken just the extrude's broken oh nope that's broken too okay i'm just going to delete that altogether go create arc from here to here to the midpoint there that'll work for now okay let's show our sketches and let's extrude into the body it doesn't matter how far you go into the body it just needs to connect to the body and hit join hit okay okay now let's try to fill it again so if i run this you can see what's going to happen is it's going to start creating that volute for me okay so that kind of gets me pretty close this kind of goes into one of the problems with the fill it command so the fillet is trying to resolve both this right here and this break here and so it kind of leaves a weird little piece right here but you can see it's already giving me my radius there and it's already connecting me to the side now you'll notice as soon as this line right here goes past this wall it starts to bring that wall out so right here it's bringing that out so you do not you need to pay attention when you're using the fill it command to make sure that it's not changing the overall shape of your design and usually that's a sign of this point going beyond that so let's do like right there that should be pretty good now that looks a little bit awkward but let me hide the lines real quick let's go visual style shaded that's not a bad looking neck transition and that was really fast and really easy to put together all we would need to do now is just cut out the top which i can show you in a second and cut out the bottom so let's go ahead and do that real quick sketch on the center plane and what i want to do is project in this line this line and this line let's go draw a line between these two points draw a line down don't worry about the dimensions for now create arc from the end point so we want it to start right there and we want it to be tangent to that line it's going to make this horizontal and now we can dimension how much of that we'd like it to cut away so i'm going to say a quarter of an inch and then it's also going to ask me where do i want this how big do i want this arc so what i'm going to do is i'm going to project in this corner so that way if you imagine i drew a line here it's going to swoop down to there and then it's going to be straight from that point further back so let's drag this back all right let's project this in first okay come on there we go and i'm gonna make this vertical to that right there so that way what i can do is i can now grab this and i can hit extrude and cut through it so all symmetric hit okay and there you go so now you've got the back side of the volute and the front side of the loop and that's actually a pretty good looking transition but like i said it it really depends on the size because it can mess up this corner it can also you're kind of just getting whatever shape the fill it gives you here and if you think it looks nice do it by all means and also it kind of leaves a little bit of a flat spot there where it's not really tapering away because the fillet only is applying to those two areas so everything here is the original body so i personally from my design don't really like using that method but hey if that works for your design it is by far the fastest and easiest way to do this and i would highly encourage you using it if it works for your design you save yourself a ton of heartache okay so let's move on to the patch command first i want to give you a little demo of kind of how it works and then we'll apply it to the headstock so you can find the patch command in the surface workspace rather than the solid workspace so if i can click surface up here go patch what it does it lets me select a boundary right so i can either select that hit okay and it's created a surface for me rather than a thick body so this has no thickness at all but it's filled in that space for me or what i could do is i can go patch make sure enable chaining is turned off let's say i go here to here and i'm selecting the boundary and go here here and then here what it will do is it'll immediately try to fill in however it thinks is best it'll try to fill in those voids again it only creates a surface body so one thing you can do once you have this all connected so let's say i patch that down there hit okay and let's say i patch this and this together now it's closed and what i can do is i can select these three surfaces that i've made and i can go modify stitch what it will do is it'll then take those three bodies here here and here and it will turn it into a solid body for me and now it's actually a regular solid body that i can manipulate however we'd normally do in the solid workspace so that's roughly how it works but let's actually apply it to the guitar so let me delete these now i've gone ahead and taken the effort to fix my constraints on my volute and set it up the way i want for this but essentially it's the same thing you draw the volute how we said you pick you put the neck profile close or near the nut wherever you'd like it to land so here's where things get a little bit more interesting so i'm actually going to extrude this up just like we did before one inch and what i want to do is i want to create multiple headstocks and that seems kind of weird but it'll make a lot more sense in a moment um so what i'm going to do let's actually sketch on here first and project in that line and let's draw in the radius that we want and then i'll show you why i'm going to make multiple head stocks so let's go create arc from here to here make it coincident to that point if i can highlight it there we go make it coincident and i want it to be tangent so i'm going to draw since i have nothing to make it tangent to i'm going to draw a construction line here like that make that horizontal make that vertical and now i can make that tangent to each other so now it's going straight back so that's the radius that we wanted to cover and then we've got this one right here and that one right there so let me get out of this and let me show you how the patch works now real quick although it's not perfect yet so if i click this this here here here keep going all the way around it's going to try to fill in that section it's amazing it already looks pretty good um and now i can use an entire an interior rail just like we do with the lofts i can set interior rail click that and it's going to constrain so if i if i deleted that you can see what what happened it's trying to figure out the best way to do that and so it's not actually following that guideline so let's hit that so now that's following it now if i just hit ok already that's a pretty beautiful transition so this is why i was saying the patch tool is really cool um one of the downsides to the patch tool is that it like i mentioned with the paper is it sometimes tries to find it it dips a little bit and it's kind of hard to see but like for example in some of these areas right here it's not actually coming tangent anymore it's coming down at like an angle and so that means that when i actually connect my headstock to my body it's gonna have a little bit of a lip there um but honestly with how easy this was to get a near perfect transition i might just settle for that but let's delete this and let me show you why i want to create multiple headstocks so i'm not sure if you noticed when i used the patch tool i was able to select lines on an existing body i didn't actually have to make a sketch so that means i didn't have to figure out the rails per se i could just take an existing body and make that part of my patch so what i can do is let watch this if i draw here let's flip this back around i know i like working from this angle come on there we go okay so if i do that same cutaway we did earlier so let me project this in this in and let me project in that line and that line and let's go ahead and draw both the top and bottom cut away so let's go arc that projecting that dot like we did before make that vertical sorry i'm going to do this real quickly and there make that horizontal vertical to mention that 0.25 make sure that oh i have an extra line there make sure those are coincident and make sure they're tangent okay now i'm gonna do the same thing on the bottom arc let's project in that dot oh create arc but this time i want to go from the nut so let's project in that create arc like that make those vertical draw the line out i went too far hold on vertical horizontal there we go sorry about that connect those two make them tangent and let's give that a quarter of an inch as well just for sake right so in theory what you'd have is you've got your rail coming up the back of the volute dimension and the cutaway from the front so that way the tuners again have a downward string angle so i need to connect that real quick before i can show you this so let's draw between there and there i'm still not connected there we go okay so let me cut this away as well same thing we did before all symmetric okay so here's the problem is because we need this perimeter right here when i cut away the bottom it's now not connected and i can't use it as a boundary so i need to actually have two different headstocks or rough models like this one where i've got the top and one where i've got the bottom so what we can do let me go back and just delete that okay so i am going to go ahead and cut this one or let's extrude this up real quick and join it to there and now let's cut through that both sides all symmetric so now you can see on the bottom side it's actually still connected right but the top side it's not so we need two different ones one where we've got the bottom and one where we've got the top and you can pick different lines from different bodies for this patch tool which is really cool so let me hide this one and now let's extrude this one up up to object note distance one inch like before okay let's show our boundaries and let's cut this one through all symmetric done okay so now we've got basically a combination of two right i've got my line here and my line up here and then i've also got my connection to the bottom and my connection to the top so now what i want to do is go patch from this arc to here actually nope not that open up our body where it's connected and we want to go up here and then come up let's show the other one okay so actually i did that wrong let me show you why so on the one with the top i want both cutaway let's go all symmetric okay so this one it's okay that it's not touching the other one it really matters so let's go back to the patch tool and do this again patch hide the body from this arc to here like that then hide this body show this one and i want to go up here from here to here to here and go all the way around and then hide this body show this one and connect it now if i hide that now you can see what i've done is oh let me get myself on my rail real quick like that okay so now not only do i have a transition i've got the transition up in a 3d curve up to where we want the headstock to sit so now i can hit ok it's pretty cool so that's basically a really thin strip of our perfect transition so let's go ahead and start patching so let's close up that now we can show our body and now what's interesting is i actually don't like connecting stitched surfaces to an existing body because sometimes it leaves weird little gaps so what i'm going to do is i'm actually just going to patch together the rest of the headstock and not even use these bodies anymore but i'm going to use them as the building blocks so let's go ahead and patch from here to here here here done patch here to here like that do the other side hatch here like that we can patch the bottom so let's patch around this curve here like that actually i'm going to take that off i'll show you why let me hide my sketches they're kind of getting in the way take these off go around and then we're going to go ahead and come around this way to close it up but it's not quite creating a good curve yet you see it's kind of leaving this little spot here so i'm going to go ahead and use this curve as an internal rail to kind of help it force it a little bit more into alignment it's still not perfect but it's pretty damn close okay hit okay on that one let's show our body again oh we already did so now we just need to close up the top let's hit patch you can see it's completely hollow inside catch here here up around this curve like that now it's kind of creating a little hump there so let's go back to our body and let's hide these other ones so let's hit cancel on that one let's open up our body and let's no we do have that line there okay so let's go back patch from here here like that okay show our body again internal rail we're going to select that line that's up top here which is going to help bring that down a little bit but you can still see that there's a little hump there so what i want to do is actually show the sketch that i made earlier right here and use that as a rail now it's still pinching it a little i can i can make that look nicer if i put a little bit more time and add more rails but let's hide the body okay so now we've got a couple faces that are flipped inside out so first thing we're going to want to do is fix those so select all the faces that are yellow and then go modify reverse normal hit ok so now it's turning them right side in and now what i can do is i can select all these bodies come up and hit stitch if you've got green on all sides that means it's going to completely close if you had one that wasn't uh like let's say this surface right here wasn't stitched or patched together then that would be a red line go and hit ok and now we've got a solid body so let's go ahead and show so you can see we used multiple headstock bodies to get that but what we ended up with was a new body that had the entire shape that we wanted so all we need to do now effectively if this is the design we wanted to go with all we would need to do now is loft between these two so you go from here to here go back to your solid workspace because we don't want to loft with a 2d dimension or a infinitely thin wall so go back to your solid workspace and hit loft and you can connect those two and let's show the sketches just for good measure let's add these as rails okay doesn't like that one that's fine and let's hide our sketches so like i said before some of these parts don't come completely tangent and so there's like a little bit of a step there but that's very very faint and easily sandable and i'm sure if i put a little bit more time into it with my rails i could make that look a lot nicer but that is one solid surface that is that has basically been figured out for us rather than us having to produce the rails in order to design it and what's really cool is because it's just auto calculated you can go back to your headstock sketch and let's say like i want to change this to something a bit more pointy so let's say like 0.875 right now let's go even further 0.75 come back it'll recalculate and it's updated and so now i have more of a sharper curve there or i can go back make it significantly wider so let's say like two inches come back let it load for a second and it's already updated so that's pretty sweet and it's not leaving any flat spots here it's immediately tapering away unlike the fillet command but also if i look at it from a top down view you can see that it's actually following this curve because we did it this way whereas on the fill it it might extend past or too sharp and not actually follow that line but because we used the boundary it had to go to that line and we ended up with a really really nice transition again i obviously you can see some of these pinch marks one way you could do this is to add more rails so that it's more defined but you could also not you could patch up to the higher surface without the cut volute and then just cut through all of it together at the end and that might actually produce a better result but yeah that's kind of how the patch command works i hope that all made sense but that is the easiest way to get as close to the perfect transition as possible lofting will get you probably closer but it also takes significantly more work so i'm gonna go ahead and start setting up for that and we'll be back in a second okay thanks for waiting i know in virtual time it was a snap of the fingers but it took me about 20 30 minutes to get that set up so i do apologize but uh let me go and walk you through how i got this loft it's almost dead on perfect you can see there's some crease some small creases there but i will show you why this method is still not quite right but let me go and show you how i set this up so this is a really really unique loft i've never quite done one like this although it is somewhat reminiscent of the one we did over here if i can highlight it where we came from this arc and swooped up to a different plane up to that arc it's not too dissimilar to that but i had to really think outside of the box for this one because what i originally tried to do in my old model was to connect from here to here down to here and swoop down to the surface kind of like a fillet i also tried like i mentioned at the beginning when i was in front of my toolbox that i also tried to imagine a line coming up here until it was on the same level as these two and making that shape and uh i got fairly similar to this but trying to draw rails like on this curve in a 3d way is just really irritating and let me show you how i got this which i believe is the best loft i've been able to do so far so let me show all the sketches real quick so just like before i drew the volute and i drew the neck profile exact same steps the difference here is instead of trying to loft from that two point um profile i actually looked at what other shapes i had available so i have an arc here another arc here an arc here kind of like a recurve shape well i have an arc here and an arc here and so like this one kind of naturally extends up to that one well if i try to do it normally and just loft from here to this back surface then like i mentioned at the beginning i get a harsh creep harsh crease but what if i actually extended that shape down off of the part so i'm not even modeling on the part anymore i'm modeling out in the ether just to give myself some more points and so what i actually did was just mimic the shape i have here as if it swept down and if it swept down then that means that i can actually loft the cut um what the challenge the the real game changer for me was i i had tried that before but every time i had tried that i had tried to make like this point go to that point right um i had never actually done i always tried to do it in one arc from this point to that point or this point to that point what was unique about this one is i actually just let this be part of the rail so instead of trying to loft to that i just let that be part of the rail and i extended it down off of the part until i had a similar shape to right here so like this one and this one and that one that's really what i'm cutting and then i'm just telling it the direction so i already knew the radius that i wanted for my volute and all i had to do here was make this tangent to that and make it connected to there i actually did not care what this shape would look like at all all that mattered is that it was tangent to this line so that it could actually continue on as a rail and so all i did was draw this and then create a a plane let me see create two planes here connected them made sure that was tangent exact same thing over here on both sides and then let me take off those rails real quick and i'll show you why i added these ones in the middle here so if i take off rail five and four oh there we go so what was happening is i actually had a really good result but the problem is it wasn't following my line here and that's actually been the really big challenge with me doing these lofts is i've been able to get good lofts but not actually following that curve so i ended up adding a rail tangent to this little line right here where the nut is up to that point on the arc so if i add those rails back in it got me much closer now i totally realize that it is still not perfect but considering how many different ways i've tried doing lofting and not gotten that result i'm actually pretty thrilled with how this turned out so i hope i i hope that made sense now i i intentionally rushed through that because it took me about 30 minutes to set up all those sketches and we've done a lot of lofting in here so i felt like you guys probably understood the concept but i wanted to show you the unique approach i took to that because i didn't try to loft from the c shape i actually just let me go before the loft real quick this was the body that i cut out of and then all i had to do was tell it the direction and that worked significantly better so what's cool about this is i was able to do it in one loft for the entire thing so i have one solid surface that's actually better than my original model so i'm really happy with that and what's also cool is it is tangent to the surface so i don't have the same problem that i have with the stitch um or patch for that matter the problem again that i ran into with this one which is why i'm still not happy with it is it's not actually following the curve that i want so that's kind of a problem it might be better if i made this radius larger then they might actually end up coming together but i really would like a way to be able to just you know model it or model it the way i had it drawn another downside to this as well although it although it looks good is that if i go back to my headstock sketch everything is all these sketches that i just connected for that loft are so co-dependent that if i try to like um if i try to change anything in here let's say let's go create arc or i'm going to mess it up so if i try to change that it breaks a lot of these sketches and then i have to every time i want to change that dimension i have to go back and fix the sketches and that's really quite irritating so that's why i'm actually really starting to prefer the patch command for this kind of a tool or not tool for this kind of a model but the loft has definitely given me a really really good result it's just so tedious and really difficult to figure out but overall i'm pretty happy with the result i've got and hopefully what i've shown you makes sense and you might be able to apply it to your model the only thing remaining for me to do on this is to actually just cut through those sketches on the neck let me see if i still have them i might have deleted them yeah i deleted them but basically i just need to cut through the top for the volute and cut through the bottom and then i'd be i'd be back where i was with the patch so please let me know if you have any more questions on how to loft the headstock i know i rushed through the lofting portion of it but i'd be happy to help as much as i can it just would have taken way too long for me to show you how i drew that in detail so hopefully you guys seeing this is enough to get the idea and start trying to apply it on your own models okay so last but not least we need to do a little house cleaning from the last episode so last time we left it off with kind of a rushed attempt at trying to model through the back of the body and i do apologize for that i tend to want to keep those errors in my videos because i feel like it's important to show that hey this is a difficult process and even people like me who've done this a lot can still run into errors and so i went ahead and left it in the video even though it kind of was a little awkward so i hope you guys forgive me for that but uh let me go and show you what a decent back of the body looks like so i basically did exactly the same thing that i did around the contour in episode i think two but the only difference is i did kind of a unique strategy with the triangles here so like before i extended these off so that way it would start on the outside and then cut in but then here i kind of imagined well it's kind of an even shape going around and so what i ended up doing was drawing a sketch from the midpoint of this arc all the way back as if i had like a right triangle so that way there was an equal amount of distortion going this way and an equal amount going the other way and that ended up leaving me with a pretty good result now if you wanted to cut through the back of the body and the neck at the same time like i was trying to show in the last video really the only difference that you'd have to do let me see if i can pull up these sketches here and i'll show you really the only difference is that this plane that this sketches on just needs to be lower so if you brought that down um if you brought that down below the actual so like let's say this line right here continued into right here and up then you could actually end up cutting through both at the same time but effectively it's the same strategy and you could all you don't have to do a triangle like i did i just did a triangle to match the contour that i did on the rest of the body but it could totally be an arc so it could be you know a nice curve that swoops right into the neck and you could cut through both the neck and the body at the same time one other way that you could definitely approach this which i haven't actually tried although i have a strong suspicion that it would work really well is to look at some of the other shapes we have here actually let me bring those sketches back up so we have a shape here right and then we have another shape here that's very very similar and then we also have another one right here right so you could imagine that instead of lofting around the body i could actually loft from the top down to the bottom so i would flip the orientation that i'm actually lofting in and then this instead of being part of my profile could actually be part of my rail so this could be a rail that continues into this section here right and goes all the way down to the bottom this one could do the same thing this could go from here down to the bottom this one right here could go from here all the way down to the bottom and so i would loft from up here to down here all the way to down here and that would actually probably work really well especially if you're trying to cut both through the body and the neck at the same time if you guys are still really struggling with modeling through the neck and the body at the same time let me know i'd be happy to try to do a another video showing just that technique alone and seeing if we can solve it together but for now i think this video has gone on long enough i hope what i've shown you guys will help i realize that everybody's design is different both for the body and for the headstock but what i tried to do with this video is give you guys some ideas because every head like i said every headstock is different and knowing what tools you have available for use is probably more important than what you're actually designing right because how you use the tool sometimes dictates how you design the bot or how you design the part and so i figured i'd show you the fill it which again is by far the easiest and the fastest and produces a pretty decent result so again if you if you use that method and you like it and it looks good and it does what you want absolutely do it save yourself the heartache of going through the other steps the patch command was definitely the most universal and the most modular so i could i could adapt things and update my design a lot easier so i think that's a really great route although it does suffer from kind of weird geometry sometimes so it might leave little lips and creases where you don't want them but the ease of use and the modularity of it is really hard to pass up and then the lofting obviously is the most tedious but you also have ultimate control over everything in the shape it's just very difficult to figure out the right shape to create with this so take take that information that i gave you and start testing it out on your model so if you're having trouble figuring out how to model your headstock try a few of those different attempts and see what works if you have a particular design that none of these seem to work at all message me and i'll see if i can find a way to make that either work for you or give you some tips that might help you get further along so thank you all for joining me on episode four i really appreciate it in the next episode i'm going to have all this tidied up and we're going to start working on some of the hardware and some of the other details so the core of the body and the neck and the headstock are basically done now we need to start adding all the little details like the fretboard and the truss rod slot and pockets for the for the bridge and the tuners and the pickups and everything and start working on all that so thank you again i'll see in a little bit have a good night

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 1,686

Keywords: Fusion 360, Guitar, Luthier, CNC, CAD, Design, Engineering, Lofting, Patch Tool

Id: nlESZjDrhQI

Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021