How to model the PERFECT Acoustic Heel Transition | Viewer Request #1 | Guitars in Fusion 360

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel in the last video i asked you all to send in requests for what you would like to have featured on my channel because ultimately i want this channel to be focused on helping you guys achieve what you want to do in fusion 360. and no doubt a bunch of you reached out to me with various ideas or projects you've been struggling with so first of all thank you all for sending in those requests i will get to as many of them as possible and if i don't feature a specific video um structured around what you requested i will then also make sure to include that information in future videos if it's pertaining to whatever topic i'm talking about so today's topic comes from vincent and here's what he said hi austin thank you so much for your willingness to help i'm very impressed with your work thank you vincent this is the heel i'm trying to make but couldn't with your method i'm new to fusion 360 and any help would be much appreciated well first of all thank you for the request vincent i really appreciate it and thank you for talking with me over the past week or so you have been great to work with and i'm proud to show you the results we came up with okay so jumping into fusion let's talk about what makes this heel transition so difficult to model well actually let's start with a headstock for example so on a headstock right you've got a smooth contour that's supposed to meet on both sides right so it's supposed to be perfectly seamless all the way around well on a heel transition actually at least one with this kind of a horn style there's an intentional seam there which changes our approach a little bit right so you kind of come to a sharp point up here at the top and then you need that sharp point to transition into a perfect curve right so this is going this line right here is going to taper down until there's nothing left on it and so that actually changes our approach a little bit it's still going to be very similar to how i modeled a headstock in my perfect headstock transition video but we're going to change some of the way we use the helper surfaces to allow us to accommodate that varying curvature okay so jumping into the design workspace let's go ahead and take a look at some of the fundamental sketches you're going to need in order to get this design off the ground so i'm going to drag my timeline back to before these three sketches because at that point i have basically modeled my headstock and my neck up until the point of where i want the transition into the heel to start so let me hide the bodies so you need your fretboard sketch so that way it gives you a grid and you can pick basically which fresh you'd like your transitions to start in an um start on you're going to want your headstock sketch and even though we're not going to be modeling the headstock today it does play an important role in determining some of the angles and where things fall so go ahead and model your entire side profile sketch as well so that includes the depth of the horn so that's going to play an important role later because we're not going to define that at any other point so i defined it as covering these two frets but if you didn't want it to fall directly on a fret you can totally do that you just give this you know a dimension here of whatever you'd like it to be and then you will want to make sure you have your neck profile determined up until the part of where you want the transition to start and doing all that you should be able to model your headstock and your neck up until that point one really important note is when you loft your neck make sure it's two separate surfaces now i know it's not ideal to have it two separate surfaces but this definitely helps us establish the curvature for the heel transition so just like in my headstock video where i did it in two halves go ahead and do your neck in two halves as well because we will be using this surface right here to establish our curvature so make sure it's two two portions or two segments rather okay so let's go ahead and get some of our remaining sketches in place and let's go and do this transition so i'm going to create a plane at angle on the back here and i'm going to do 90 degrees now you could do it this way or you can do an offset plane either one is totally fine i do prefer to draw my plane on the back of the transaction transition rather than the fret because at any point if i decide no i want this transition to start or not start and a little bit further up or a little bit further back it still stays with the sketch with the side profile sketch rather than the fret it's not locked to that fret so go and hit ok and then sketch on that plane and so now we need to define what the back side where the heel transition interfaces with the guitar looks like so let's project in since we're on the fret let's go ahead and project in this fret and let's project in this point as from the construction line that gives us our taper of the neck so at this point the neck is like .6 inches or whatever you decide the thickness to be at the headstock transition and then up here it's going to be obviously be taller so this just projects that you know that uh that taper all the way back to the surface so that way when we create our neck profile at that fret it's still accurate so let's go create arc here here now we're maintaining the two separate segment portions even on the back here it's probably not necessary but i try to be consistent so and then make these two equal so we made these two tangent and equal so that way it automatically defines it for us we don't need to give any dimensions now obviously if you're using a different shape of neck then you would just give it whatever dimensions you desire and then let's go and make these construction lines because they're just going to help us get some of the dimensions in place now let's draw a line up here and we're going to make it midpoint to the top of our transition and then we're just going to define what is that dimension so how wide do we want that little horn to be so i'm going to type one inch but it can be whatever you'd like and then all we need to do now is just create let's hide our bodies get those out of the way all we need to do now is just create an arc from this point to this point now you can do it in two separate arcs and that works just fine because all we're going to be using these for is rails for a loft so it doesn't matter if your arc looks something like this right if you want to have like a curve that swoops up um but i find that this works the best so just create an arc here and arc here and then you want it to be tangent to your neck profile let's see yep it didn't apply tangent so select these two and make those tangent that should automatically lock it in place make sure it's not a construction line go create arc that and there we go so that defines the back side of our heel transition and now that gives us all the information we need so we have three points here and now we have all the information we need to go ahead and draw the horn so let's close this sketch and we're going to create a new plane at angle right here we'll do 90 degrees on that one as well and let's go and sketch on that plane and create our horn so let's bring in these four point are these three points then what we're going to do is we're going to draw a little arc or a little square now you don't have to do this but you'll see why i'm doing it in a moment and let's make these horizontal and let's make this midpoint to that projected line make that vertical okay so now we need to do is create two arcs an arc here and an arc here and you don't necessarily have to make this come tangent to this line i chose to so that way when it hits the back you know that wall of the body of the guitar it's coming perpendicular to it but you don't have to do that but if you want to follow along go ahead and do that so let's make those tangent and then let's go ahead and give ourselves let's just project in that line so we close off the sketch i don't think that's actually necessary but that's fine okay so now we have the fundamental sketches but now we need to go ahead and create some helper surfaces so let's go back to this sketch real quick because what we need to do is we need to create a new helper line or helper arc just like we did on this neck profile but here so let's go back to that sketch and let's create a three-point arc and then let's make these two concentric and then you just either need to define a height or you need to constrain where this point lands somehow so i just go like this and make it vertical to that and i did that whatever you choose to do just do it consistently all the way down the neck whenever you create these little helper arcs and so that's all we need for that one and then on this one let's go back so we need an arc that comes from here out and we need one that comes from here back so let's go and create arc from this point and this point and let's make these concentric and these concentric and now we just need to define where those points are going to land as well and again the reason why we're doing this is you know we could just draw a straight line coming out from here let's say that's tangent to here so if we did that that would totally be fine but what that means is that we would end up using a tangency constraint when we loft our helper surfaces rather than a curvature constraint so this is kind of the difference between tangent and curvature right so at this point it comes tangent and that they would theoretically go straight back but if it maintains the same rate of curvature then that arc would actually keep going and so oftentimes they look very similar but there might be slight differences in the surface that would change that so let's go ahead and make that line up with our fretboard so let's project that in let's make that a construction line and then make these coincident so that locks that in place because the reason i did that is because it's going to end up lofting down to a point that's on the fretboard anyway and so it kind of keeps it in line with that so i don't get any extra twisting and then this one we can just go ahead and either dimension it to let's say this fretboard or we can just give it a dimension i'm just going to go ahead and project in this fret line make that a construction line and make these coincident so that way it locks that in place and then one small little tiny sketch that we need is just create a sketch on the fretboard plane and we need to create a little line let's project in this point need to create a little line right here and let's project in this point and make these coincident now the point of this is because at the base of the fretboard the heel transition would keep going back in a straight line at this point at the top here it maintains the same rate of curvature as the horn but at the base it actually follows the fretboard and so we needed a curved line here and a straight line here so we're going to end up lofting between a curved line and that straight line so that way essentially we're telling the patch tool that we're going to be using later this is what that surface would look like if it kept going so hit finish and now we have everything we need to go ahead and create our helper surfaces so let's go to the surface tab create loft and you're just going to loft between these two and create a rail here sorry my bodies aren't showing that's why i didn't show up so we need that one and let's go create loft again between this line and this line and then we want to use a rail we want that rail to be this line right here so it's transitioning from a curve to a straight line but following that path let's bring back our sketches one more time and go create one more loft from here but in this case we're not going to select this line we're going to select the surface line and then as for a rail we're going to choose this line and this line or whatever arc you created for that transition and then on the surface profile so you can see on this profile we don't have any tangency or curvature constraints but on this neck we do so let's go and change that to curvature you can see that it slightly changes it slightly changes the shape but that's good because that means that at this point it's going to be exactly the same shape so hit ok and so that's kind of a big difference from what we did with the headstock because in the headstock for example if i undo that last loft in the headstock we extruded this out but that was because it maintained the same rate of curvature going up but in this case it doesn't it's changing from like a really large radius to a very fine point and when i tried doing it this way it kind of worked but it ended up giving me some weird humps and dips in the patch tool and as soon as i figured out that actually i should be lofting that it worked out great okay so now we can go ahead and do our first half of the heel so let's hide our sketches and let's go create patch select all all four of these lines and change all of them to curvature bring back our sketches and just select that line to close it off and hit ok so we did a bunch of work up front to make that process very simple and that was kind of the point so let's delete these three surfaces i can actually select them and then mirror this over because this is a symmetrical design now if it's not symmetrical you'd end up creating two sets of helper surfaces one for each side of the transition and then you would patch them and stitch them together so let's go create mirror mirror plane here hit okay and so now we've got our headstock our volute or headstock transition our neck and the heel transition basically mapped out all we need to do now is patch up the boundaries so let's go create patch bring up our sketches we're going to patch that line or that surface i'm going to patch that and that hit okay and let's go ahead and stitch all these together make sure we've got no red lines nope we're good okay so there's our transition now let's take a look at what we have so we have a seamless transition between here between these four points which is good we don't see any pits or dimples or creases or anything but we do know because we made it come to a sharp point that it's going to slur slightly crease itself on its way up the transition that's exactly what we want in this case now you'll notice i didn't give this a radius because if i drew the radius in then that would drastically change the curvature that we wanted right so this loft right that would end up being a really tiny little arc right here but we actually needed that to follow the curvature of the main arc not the fillet let's say and so i went ahead and did it as a straight point and now we can just use a fillet of let's say point zero three one three thirty seconds of an inch or sorry one thirty second of an inch just to kind of soften that edge you can make it larger but with this approach there's one caveat and that's if with this fillet you can see that it starts to taper that surface back so let's go you can see how this is completely vertical right now but if i applied like a 3 8 of an inch it starts to taper that surface back now if you're totally fine with that no problem if you want to maintain let's go first let's go and do this let's just delete this if you want to maintain that all the way up that vertical but still have a large radius then you're going to need to draw it in um and then you might have to adjust your patch tool a little bit or some of your helper surfaces um i wasn't able to get that working so i highly recommend you do it this way wink wink but i think it'll be fine so let's go ahead and do 132 of an inch just to soften that edge a little bit and let's take a look at the curvature so let's do zebra analysis so we've got a pretty nice transition coming from these surfaces and we do see that it starts to crease on its way up and that's what we expected we do have slight imperfections in this back corner it looks like you can see it's starting to spike a little bit but otherwise everything else looks pretty flawless and actually you can you can kind of see it in the reflections here but it is so faint that i wouldn't be worried about that at all that's going to be you'll never see that in wood when when you cut it so i'm pretty happy with that now before we go any further let's go ahead and try to change our design and see if we maintained our parametric constraints so let's go ahead and change the width of this transition let's do like 0.375 something pretty narrow and you'll see that we actually maintained that entire transition it's looking really nice there's no major dips or creases or anything other than obviously this one and let's go back and let's do something wider let's do like two inches now because we didn't because the way we drew the arc we didn't make a tangency constraint or making it perpendicular so it ended up arcing out that's fine if you're going to do something that wide anyway you might have to adjust so we did break it actually at this point but i think that's because it went beyond the width of my neck so let me try changing this just a little bit smaller let's do like 1.75 nope okay so we did break something let's go back a couple times let's try 1.5 now that works and go back in let's try two and two inches works there i for some reason i think as i was coming from .375 up to two inches it didn't like that but when i went from my one inch to two inches it was just fine so let's hide our sketches and take a look here so same concept we've got a crease that slowly fades in and everything's actually looking quite good so i'm pretty happy with that so let's go back to our one inch and last thing we need to do is we need to get in our dovetail for where it meets the body so let's go ahead and sketch on this back surface now it doesn't have to be a dovetail you know it can be a tenon or anything like that it's fine i'm choosing to use a dovetail in this case so let's go let's project in this bottom line and then we're going to go create line up like this and then create a three-point arc between these two and make those tangent and then let's draw a construction line from here to here so that way it becomes vertical and then we just define this radius right here so let's do 0.75 inches actually that's 0.375 would make it 0.75 yeah there we go and then how far up do we want it to go so i'm going to dimension from here to here let's do three inches okay and now we can extrude that out with we don't have to do any surface modeling we can just extrude that out by whatever depth you'd like it to go into the body so i'm going to do 0.75 and then this might be fine as is but if you'd like to add a dovetail i can show you a really quick and easy way to do that so you sketch on this bottom surface let's hide some of these other sketches and let's go create lines we're going to draw the portion we'd like to cut away and let's make this points coincident these points coincident make that vertical and let's define our angle so if you wanted like a 15 degree dovetail that would be seven and a half in each direction so let's go point or seven point five degrees and then you can take this sketch and you can just go create your solid create sweep and you can use this path right here as the path for it hit ok and now you've got your dovetail and so the only thing really remaining to do is maybe the little keel cap so we can go create new component hit okay and then we can sketch on this surface so whatever this surface ends up being as long as it's not a sharp point as long as you did apply a fillet this will work and project in that geometry and we can just extrude that up by whatever thickness you want that cap to be so i'm just going to do 0.125 and then we can apply a fill it to that we'll do the same as the one above whereas the one on the front here and then let's go and apply some appearances so i'm gonna do that and we've kind of i kind of created a little ivory ivory color and let's go to render and we are now officially back to where we started so i am actually really happy with how that turned out i went through a bunch of different iterations over the past week and it is still quite tricky and i haven't quite nailed as you saw some of the parametric constraints because and i i think it has to do with because this comes to a sharp point and then i'm creating a fill it and so those two whatever the combination of those two end up being so the width and the fill it here i think sometimes it might break it so i am still going to be working when i get an opportunity to develop that a little bit further and see if i can really nail the parametric side of this but otherwise i'm really happy with the actual surface results we got and it is still fairly parametric you just can't go too extreme with it so thank you for joining me on this episode i hope this was helpful again as always if you guys have any questions leave me some comments down below and i will do my best to answer them i try to answer every comment that i can and if you guys have any if you want to have your video featured on my channel i do have a discord link and an email in the about section of my channel it's also going to be in the links below and feel free to send me some ideas or something that you're struggling with and we might just create a video just like this for your idea so thank you all for joining me i appreciate it and have a good night

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 854

Keywords: Autodesk Fusion 360, CAD, CAD Modeling, CAM, CAM Basics, CNC, CNC Router, DIY, Fusion 360, Fusion 360 Beginner, Fusion 360 CAM, Fusion 360 CAM Guitars, Fusion 360 CAM Tutorial, Fusion 360 Tutorials, Guitars in Fusion 360, Tutorials, Xcarve, fusion 360 tutorial, Headstock Transition, Headstock Transition in Fusion 360, Headstock Fusion 360, Autodesk, Acoustic Guitars, Acoustic Guitars in Fusion 360, Acoustic Guitar Heel, Acoustic Guitar Heel in Fusion 360, Guitar Heel in Fusion 360

Id: zyzal8iH_VQ

Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021