How to model Carved Tops in Fusion 360 in under 15 minutes.

hey everybody this is Austin and welcome back to the channel now as most of you know my videos can be very long-winded detailed and pretty much impossible to watch in one sitting so today we're going to be doing something a little bit different now hundreds of you I mean I really mean it hundreds of you have asked me how to model carved top guitars in fusion 360. and today I'm going to show you how to do that in under 15 minutes now full transparency this isn't going to be a precise replica of your favorite carved Top guitar design but rather just an introduction to the basic techniques and practices that you're going to need to be familiar with in order to be successful and hopefully maybe I can inspire you to go ahead and give it a try on your own design so I've already said enough let's dig right in all right so quick disclaimer I'm not going to pretend for a second that this is necessarily the right way to do this for every type of design each design is a little bit different and might require a different technique however the way I'm going to show you right now is the fastest way I've found to get a quick and clean result that I can modify easily to get my you know creative juices flowing and so that way I can really arrive at the design I want to much quicker so let's get started so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a sketch on the top plane and let's go and reorient the sketch and what we're going to do is we're going to draw a basic and very classic guitar outline and in this case I'm just going to go ahead and use splines now I always prefer control point splines over fit point splines so let's go ahead and draw this I'm just going to come out give myself a bit of a recurve that and we'll do one more like that okay and let's edit this a little bit so I'm going to make these horizontal because what we're going to do is we're going to mirror this side over to the other side so it's symmetric and let's adjust this a little bit to get it looking a little bit cleaner okay that's looking pretty good okay I'm actually pretty happy with that so let's go ahead and mirror this over so I need to create a center line I'm going to use a line right here and I'm going to leave it not as a construction line and that will be important later so we can go create mirror and we're going to mirror this sketch across this line hit OK and now we can see that you know maybe we need to update a design a little bit because once we see the whole thing maybe it doesn't look quite as good as we thought so let's update that a little bit I'm gonna make these sections a little bit flatter Maybe okay I think that's going to work for now let's update that there we go I think that's going to work for now that's a relatively classic body shape nothing's nothing too fancy let's just go and hit OK and sketch one is done so now what we need to do is we need to draw a center line and this is going to represent the cross section of the center of our guitar what that profile is going to look like so we can just sketch on the side plane and let's project in this line so click that line p on the keyboard enter and now we can go ahead and hide this sketch so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a straight line out because most designs have some form of flat area that you know the pickups and and the neck Etc need to mate to so again it's not me mathematically accurate just enough to give you guys an idea of how to do this so let's draw it out to there and I'm going to grab another spline because what I need to do is create a little bit of a recurve here to connect these two so spline control Point spline draw out from here like this and back enter okay and let's make sure these are collinear so that way the curvature is the same and then let's go ahead and adjust this as necessary so let's bring back this sketch and make sure the Apex of this roughly lines up with the Apex of right here and that looks pretty good so let's go ahead and hit finish and that one's already done now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go ahead and Loft this to show you how the loft is going to work and then we can go ahead and create rails to further control what that curvature is going to look like so this can be done with both a solid loft or a surface Loft so if I come up here and hit Loft what we're going to do is we're going to Loft from this section to the center oh I had something already selected we're going to Loft from this section to the center section to this section kind of like a book now if I were to hit OK you can see we already have essentially a carved top but maybe we don't like what this loft is doing and we want to provide a little bit more control over the shape so that's where rails come in so let's go ahead and delete this Loft and what we need to do in order to establish rails is we need to create planes at the Apex of every one of these curves so we have one here here and here so let's go ahead and you can do offset planes or playing a long path or however you want to do this I'm just going to go ahead and do offset planes because it's the simplest from this section and I'm going to look at the top view here I'm going to make sure it roughly lines up with the Apex of these curves hit OK another plane from here look at the top drag it to the Apex of that curve hit OK another plane from here drag it out and roughly to the Apex of that curve as well okay I think that's going to be all right and now what we can do is we can use those planes to sketch the different cross sections to control the curvature so let's go ahead and sketch on this plane right here and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to project in the geometry that we've already drawn so that way any rails that we draw we can guarantee will connect and Loft appropriately so what we're going to do is we're going to project include intersect and I'm going to select this line this line this line and that one hit okay and now I can actually go ahead and hide those two sketches and let's hide our other planes and we can draw our curvature between here so for the time being I didn't mean to hit Circle so for the time being I'm going to go ahead and do spline control Point spline and I'm going to come out up across down and over okay now I find that it's very helpful to do this all in one spline rather than mirroring anything over I've just found that it tends to work a little bit better so let's go ahead and make these two horizontal and let's make these equal so that way there's a little bit of symmetry going across this section and let's make this spline coincident to this point so that way we know it's going to cross through let's make this horizontal so that way it's coming perfectly tangent or curvature at the top and then all we need to do is basically constrain this so that way it doesn't get a little Haywire on us so what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a midpoint line from here to here make that a construction line and make that vertical so that way we guarantee that that's going to be symmetric and if I wanted to I could give that a dimension to lock that one down and then this one a dimension and then we'd have a fully constrained spline now I'm not going to constrain these for the time being just for example purposes so let's go ahead and just get something roughly like what we want I think that will look pretty good right about there hit okay and the first one's done and now we can go and do the second one so let's go ahead and sketch on this plane and we will go project include intersect it's exactly the same process click these four four lines hit OK hide the other two and draw our spline oh spline control Point spline here up across down over done make these two horizontal and we'll make them equal make that horizontal make this one connect to here and let's draw a midpoint line from here to here make that construction and make that vertical so that way we have this spline pretty much under control and then let's uh see let's get this a little bit more extreme in the center just for visual purposes okay I think that's going to be okay hit okay and now we can if we wanted to we could show both of these so there's our two rails and let's draw one more sketch on that plane exact same thing project include intersect this line this one this one and this one hit okay hide the other sketches and let's draw our control Point spline oh one more time up cross over down over done make these horizontal make these equal now again you could drag this below to create some recurve if you needed to but in this case I'm not going to do that let's create our midpoint line from here to here make that construction make it vertical and I need to make this coincident to that line okay and we're right back to where we were so let's go ahead and drag these out something like that sure okay so now what we can do is we can actually come back and re-loft this with all of these different rails that we've added so let's go ahead and do solid Loft from this section to the middle oh I had something selected already let me delete these from this section to this section to this section and then we're going to click add a rail and the first one is going to be here you can see we've got a little bit of a pinch section already so we're going to control that with the second one here and the third one we're going to add up here and then hit OK and let's hide our sketches and now we have a carved top basically how we wanted it or how we sketched it now by doing this as a solid the bottom is already flat for us so if we wanted to make this like a drop top all we have to do is just extrude that down let's say like a quarter of an inch and now we already have a drop top that we can throw on top of our design now let's say for example that you wanted to do this as a surface and let's say you want to do this as like a hollow body or something like that so I'm going to delete that Loft and we're just going to do the same thing in the surface Loft so in the surface tab we're going to go Loft and let's reshow our sketches we're going to do the exact same thing we're about instead of doing from the profile here we're going to come from the edge so from this Edge to this Edge oh delete that from this Edge new profile this one hold Ctrl and select this other one because they're two separate pieces and then or do our third edge here now we've basically the same point the only difference is it's Hollow underneath and now we'll do a rail here another rail here and another rail here now we've done the exact same thing the only difference is the bottom side is also curved you've got a hollow section here so let's go ahead and modify reverse normal so that way it flips the face and let's say you wanted to do a hollow section right so there's two different ways to do this you can either thicken and thicken this surface so let's say like this what that does is it gives you the thickness but it retains the hollow inside surface of that but the downside to thicken is that these edges aren't perfectly vertical right so you can see there's a taper here so if you wanted something like that that was perfectly vertical but you wanted to retain that hollow inside portion what you could do instead is you could come up to your bodies collect that body copy paste drag it down whatever Dimension you wanted so let's say 0.25 or negative 0.25 hit OK so now we have two copies of the same thing and now we just need to connect them so I can select extrude select that outer profile go up by 0.25 hit OK and now we have the whole thing and we can just Stitch it together hit okay and so now we have vertical walls along the whole side here but we also have a carved top and a hollow underneath so this would be great for like violin making or hollow body guitars Etc so before we go ahead and close out the video let me show you what the curvature Combs or not the curvature Combs the zebra analysis look like you get an idea of what kind of curvature you're getting out of this that is basically Flawless curvature on both sides of the guitar there's really no major Peaks or valleys or anything because we used uh Lofts rather than patches or anything like that now also we could do is go inspect and ISO curve analysis now this is where it's a little interesting because in theory you'd want the iso curves to wrap around the bottom like this rather than coming to a point and because we lofted it the way we did it does come to a point I don't think that really matters in the long run but if you do want the iso curves to properly wrap around the end you would have to Loft it slightly differently so what you could do is Loft from from here to here so you'd have to split this line so you'd Loft up to this section then Loft from this rail to this rail to this rail and then Loft the final section so instead of lofting from this side to this side you Loft from this side to this side and you could achieve something slightly different now I typically don't do that because when I'm doing this kind of a method I'm trying to rough in an idea I'm trying to get an idea of what I want this guitar top to look like and then I can come in and do some refinements now one other thing that most of you who are actually going to apply this to your models may want to know is that you could also draw a you could pre-draw your flat section so let's say let's go ahead and draw this just for example now I'm not going to actually model the whole thing so let me come up to spline and let's say I wanted a flat section that was like it's gonna be a really bad drawing I apologize you know maybe I wanted a section like that on top of the guitar that was flat for all my pickups Etc you could totally do that but you'd need to draw it on that plane right there and then your rails would intersect with this sketch rather than going through the center line I hope that makes sense basically when you create your planes and you create your rails you'd project intersect that line and draw your rails to connect to that line and then that way you can make sure that everything lines up the way you expect and you can patch that flat section Etc all right well there you have it a simple yet pretty bulletproof technique to get good results with simple carved top designs now like I said at the beginning there's a lot of different ways to do this so I will show you more of those techniques when I get around to making let's call it more recognizable designs but I hope this gives you a pretty good understanding of what we were trying to accomplish some of the techniques involved and simplify the process for you enough to go ahead and get started and make it not feel so overwhelming so give this a try let me know what you think I will see you in the next video this is Austin signing out

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 12,176

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, Groomsman Gift Box, Guitars in Fusion 360, Tutorials, fusion 360 tutorial, render, Fusion 360 render, rendering basics, Carved Top Guitars, Carved tops Fusion 360, Archtop Fusion 360, Gibson Les Paul, Les Paul

Id: 9duiqt5yuic

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022