How To: Shoulder Joints in Nomad on iPad for 3D Printing

I made an action figure of an old man ninja turtle he's an old man he's a Ninja Turtle it's an action figure it's articulated it took a lot of trial and error as you can see a lot of people ask me about how I did all of these joints because I did it all by hand in Nomad on the iPad so today I'm going to teach you how to do the shoulder joint that joint right there the shoulder it is a two-part joint that consists of a pin and that whatever you would call that I don't know what you call that is that but like a disc I I don't know what you call that but that's what I'm gonna do it's also the hip joint on this guy same joint this one's much cleaner and prettier so I'm going to use this for examples but it's not really a great hip joint anyway let's jump to it I'm going to teach you how to make this but first I'm going to say thanks to all my patrons while I clean up my mess here the patrons support this channel they support me they help keep me inspired to keep doing this stuff to keep sharing this information and most importantly their contributions help pay for my side project the controller project where I make game controllers for people with physical disabilities let's get into it so if we look at our Ninja Turtle let's inspect just this joint here if you're unfamiliar with Nomad sorry I'm going to go a little bit fast if you want to learn all the basics I highly recommend that you check out Southern Graphics I think is what it's called Glenn Southern I think is his name I'll put a link to it down below great tutorials on Nomad we'll get you started and we'll get you navigating but this is how we're going to look at this so I'm going to navigate up here I'm going to start hiding everything that is not this shoulder I could go into solo mode but I actually want two pieces here and I'm not smart enough to be able to do all of that uh intelligently whoops so shoulder there it is so we can hide everything else and now we just have our shoulder we can see here our shoulder is two pieces now we're going to ignore this piece down here even though by the time we're done you'll know how to make that too uh more or less actually this is really messy so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch to the thigh joint so let's bring that back in hip and leg and let's come down here and look at this so this is much much cleaner um Let Me Hide the other ones the shoulder and the shoulder pin are hidden and now we have the leg and the hip okay so we can see here we have these two pieces that interlock together and it looks complicated but it's really not really the the most difficult part of this is that you are going to have to be making lots of copies of things and trying to keep them straight in your mind as to what they are but here are as I said the major components you have this piece here which rotates and then this outer piece which fits around it and this is all a ball that fits into a socket here so what we have to create are the holes for everything to fit in that are precisely fit the shape that's going to fit into those holes and this division here okay so let's do this with something simple like a square a block so here we can see this is the same thing but it's kind of loose and Wiggly uh this is the same thing the central piece an outer piece that connects to it a hole that fits tight so it snaps fits together let's make this in Nomad all right we'll go to a new scene here now in Nomad one of the important things to remember is that your units are in millimeters so we need to start with something that is a decent size if you're going to be 3D printing this in the first place let's delete this sphere and let's add a box and when we come down here to the size right now it's one millimeter on all sides that is nowhere near big enough let's do 25 millimeters on all sides and then zoom out this is really large for nomad so it's admittedly kind of confused so now we have a box I'm going to validate this if I go to my settings here and look at wireframe you can see this is a pretty dense box I didn't specify anything on it I probably should have this is too dense actually and it will probably crash Nomad but uh if it does I will start over and uh reshoot all this and pretend that I didn't even screw up but look how dense that is that should work just fine we'll find out so you're going to need a box that's our shoulder we're going to need a sphere to determine this here as well as this shape here so let's create a sphere we can see here that the sphere radius is a half a millimeter let's let's just start let's go to 20 millimeters oh yeah all right so that's a huge sphere we're going to shrink that down and let's look at this does that look about right I don't know we're eyeballing it this isn't CAD we're not being exact uh the fact is there's no specific exact amount that this has to be nestled in if we look at the shoulder here we can see there's barely any ball there to it but the hip there's a lot more bear in mind the deeper you sink in the less Mobility you're going to have on your pivot here so you can see this one here is only about a third of the way in so it can really flex and move so this is fine that looks good so um we will go ahead and validate that I'm going to turn off wireframe because it's ugly and we can go back to this pretty stuff here now here's where things are going to start getting confusing we know we need to cut a hole for this so we're going to take this sphere and I'm going to rename this as cutter just so I can keep uh tabs on it and I'm going to duplicate it okay so one's cutter the new one is going to be shoulder okay uh let's go ahead and hide the shoulder and just look at the cutter for now now those are identical they have to stay identical I want this to be a tight fit like this leg so I am not going to do any size differences see how this is not flopping around it's nice and tight if you want this don't scale these at all if you want it loose like this what you would do is you would scale this cutter up by a tiny amount it's very difficult to measure in Nomad it is possible by scrolling to this measure tool right here and hitting two points but it's very it's view dependent it's not perfect and I hate it so let's not do it okay so we're going to leave it alone what we have now is the box and the cutter visible and the shoulder is hidden and not selected so we're going to cut a hole in this box using that cutter how we do that is we select the Box we select the cutter we hide the cutter see how that looks Cutters hidden box is visible and we're going to do a voxel merge this number here determines the resolution of the voxel merge you can see you can adjust it here for what we're doing here I don't need this very high resolution but what I do need is keep sharp edges I don't want those edges to be all rounded over and funky so let's hit voxel merge and see what happens it's going to think and boom we now have a hole the size of that sphere just out of curiosity let's load our shoulder in well look at that it fits perfect beautiful we love it we love to see it okay now just FYI let's hide that shoulder again you can go through and do things like smooth your edges here because this is going to be nasty and it won't hurt anything because it's relaxing outwards however if you were to be drawing in clay and you whoops and you went across there you would screw up and you went across there you would screw up your ball joint it wouldn't fit right anymore so you got to be careful and you got to do this pretty much at the end of your sculpt or close to it after this point you don't want to be screwing with it okay we've cut a hole in it now what we have to do is we have to make the uh the cut and that spear to make it into an actual joint itself so let's bring our sphere back and let's go to our left view now here's a tip whenever you're going to be doing these Cuts you go to your left view you go to your camera uh sorry maybe not your camera There It Is your camera and you choose orthographic you want orthographic right here because if you do perspective it warps it by perspective orthographic makes it straight on I might have that backwards but it looks right so I think I have it right anyway what we're going to do is we're going to cut this sphere believe it or not I did this whole thing by I using the trim tool what I tended to do was to make a duplicate just in case I screwed it up and I hide it so I've got this shoulder selected here the duplicates hidden with the shoulder selected I'm going to choose the split tool I'm going to come over here to line and I'm just going to choose about a third of it and I'm going to try to make that line vertical parallel to this Square and then I'm going to do the same thing over here whoops I gotta select this one and now do it now you might be asking what if you screw up and you don't get those precise enough that this is going to roll smoothly um I did it by eye for this whole thing and it worked you just as long as it's close enough that it looks pretty um oops we select view to get off of that so we can look around so now we have three separate objects oh it's going to auto save here I'm just gonna say okay yes okay all right so now we have three separate objects and we want to combine come on now let's go to a different tool let's combine these outer two pieces that are labeled shoulder we're going to combine those just doing uh well we could do a voxel merge or a simple merge or we could leave them alone we'll do a simple merge for now and then this middle one I'm going to call joint now this actually is going to serve another purpose here in a moment so let's make the rest of this shoulder here we're going to make we need this part here we're going to make a box door cylinder here let's do a cylinder just to mix things up you can put in a size or you could just eyeball it scale it up whatever that's too big right so let's scale it down yeah all right so pretty so there's our our bicep if you will uh and what we're going to do is we're going to join this with those two outer pieces let's validate that let's take this and connect it to our shoulder and let's do a voxel merge with sharp stuff selected or you know what it really doesn't matter the order that you do this but I kind of want to make the cutout in that cylinder first for this central part now this central part here needs to be able to rotate freely in there and right now the inside of that cylinder is overlapping it it's not going to be able to if it printed it would be fused together so we actually need to cut a hole in this Central segment in this bicep so what we're going to do is we're going to choose this Center piece here called The Joint we're going to duplicate that you see what I mean about all these duplications and we're going to stretch it this way and we're going to stretch it this way without stretching it on this axis we just want it wider that is huge we're gonna we're gonna scale that back a little bit so you can see that's bigger here let me hide the bicep or yeah this bicep out here let me hide that and you can see see it's bigger we want it even just a little bit bigger this is a duplicated one and that's just a clear space in this bicep so we have the bicep and we have this joint piece which I'm now going to make invisible so it's a cutter and I'm going to do a voxel merge your resolution here for this box will merge again is going to be dependent on how much sculpting you have again if you want to learn about voxel resolution go watch Glenn's videos so I've got the bicep shown this piece hidden I'm going to do a voxel merge and now if we look let's do solo on just this bicep hey look at that it's got a big chunk cut out of it so that this Central piece can rotate freely you can see there's a gap there oh it's a beautiful Gap all right now I'm going to combine this and those two outside pieces so we have the cylinder and the shoulder voxel merge sharp edges on whatever resolution you want for this it's fairly low box will merge now we have that this now this outer part is complete except for a filament hole which you could either just drill out by hand or I'll show you how to make that at the end okay time to do the pen that goes inside this socket here now let's hide this which is still called the shoulder keep the joint but let's hide the Box so we have the joint here now that hole is going to be made by a cylinder and a sphere so let's start with a cylinder we will scale this up for those of you that do things exact I know this is torture let's go to the front view and then let's bring it in here let's say this is to to Fat all right and I want it fatter actually yeah this one's gonna be chunky all right so we'll go to the top view here we'll move it a little bit so it's at least close to centered that looks good all right so let's make uh let's make the sphere that goes on the end now you might be wondering why and what the heck and what's going on and I will tell you this sphere at the end is the nub you can barely see it there but there's a nub that allows this to go in you can see it better on this one it allows it to go in and snap into place and hold there you don't want that nub to be bigger than like maybe a millimeter at most on a big one um but you know what I'm not measuring it I'm just looking at it here so let's look let's just look at this sucker here right we don't want this to be too much bigger than the cylinder that looks fine to me so I'm going to combine the cylinder and the sphere we'll do a voxel merge keep sharp edges this is now one piece and this is what's going to determine both the hole in here and the pin here so we need to make a copy of it again making tons of copies of everything so let's make a copy of this boom let's call this one cutter and let's select it and then let's hide the one with no name and then let's bring our box back because we're gonna just go ahead and cut this into our box and unhide that okay now just so you can see what's going on I'm gonna hide uh this oh this joint okay so you can see here that cylinder is in there it is selected I'm gonna hide it so that it will cut I'm going to turn this resolution up a little bit I try not to do anything under like 140 150. uh there's no reason for that and then I do a voxel merge and then what we can see here is that it is cut in there and we have that nice Ridge for it to grab onto but now we need to make the pin itself so let's go back to our shoulder let's hide our box and oh not our shoulder sorry our joint so we're going to hide our box so here's our joint all lonely we need to go to the cylinder that was a duplicate okay this is going to become our pin oh whoops I messed up see that that shouldn't have been there that's going to mess things up a little bit when you do this be sure to check and make sure you're not doing that make sure it's centered but for the sake of this video we're going to pretend that didn't happen it's actually not that big of a problem uh whenever it comes down to it actually I'll show you how to fix that right now just for this uh example since we know that that will catch and get in the way we can just go to flatten here make our brush bigger and just kind of there now it won't catch it's not pretty but it won't catch all right so to cut this sucker so that it's the right shape flat on the sides so you can print it easily and then a cutout in the middle for flex and stretch relief that's again making more stuff we're going to make a box and we're going to size it up and we're going to get oh so scientific about this we're going to move it out we're going to move it over and we are gonna scale it and we are gonna try to get it lined up with the side of our model over here there's so many different ways you could do this this is just a way that works fastest for me right so this looks like it's going to work if I make it taller what we're going to do is we're going to use this to cut the side off but before we do it we're going to duplicate it and we're going to move the duplicate over the other side all right let's top here and see if we've got this lined up man I got that Circle way off center that sphere I mean okay so now we got these two boxes here all we got to do is we got to hide these two boxes select them and select our cylinder and do a voxel merge and it'll cut the sides off just like everything else we've been doing let me just get a top view here so you can see it and we've got again we've got these boxes selected and hidden the cylinder selected box will merge with keep sharp edges turned on and blammo we're almost there except if you jam this in there there's no flex to it so it wouldn't fit very well you'd have to really really slam it in there and there's a good chance it would split this outer one so what we're going to do is we're going to cut relief in it there's a lot of ways you could do this if you want it to be really pretty you could use another box to cut out the inside but you know what actually worked really well for me is um you can get it okay like oh my goodness anyway we'll do it like this so you get it like this and you go to your trim tool and you go to lasso and you just go hey look at that there's stress relief so if you look here this one I did super pretty I actually used a box and a cylinder to make it so pretty this one I just did that lasso tool and it works perfectly so we're almost done this and this now need to be joined the pin and this uh and this joint need to be joined together we're going to do a voxel merge and now we have this one whoops let's get off of trim here so I'm not cutting it up anymore now we have this beautiful single piece we are almost totally completed folks all that's left now is the hole for the filament again you could drill this by hand and there's a good chance if you screw this up later you're going to be drilling it anyway as a point of fact I did all of these I made the holes perfect for filament but then I went back in and I sculpted some stuff and it warped the hole so I had to find a drill bit that was slightly smaller than filament and just wiggle it around in there until it worked so you know whatever choose your battles so let's bring back our shoulder so this is what we're working with here and I'll show you how I got a filament uh hole lined up perfectly with the center that's the remaining piece of this puzzle duplicate of a sphere here let me hide let me just go here we want to cut a hole directly through the center of this sphere what we do is we create our cylinder that's going to be our filament we make the radius one millimeter which makes it a two millimeter diameter we make our length something long that we know will stick out both ends right and we want to line it up to this sphere if any of you all know a more automated way let me know but right now what I can do is I can tap back and forth and I can see by looking at the Gizmo that this needs to move over a little bit that's pretty close now let's look at it from the front so it needs to move down that's pretty close we can go at an angle you see how the Gizmo I'm looking right here at this line on the Gizmo and you can see how it stays oh it looks like I need to move over a little bit now remember you're going to have to duplicate this which I'm going to call filament because I we have uh two pieces we need to cut okay so first let's cut this bicep by going here selecting one of the filaments and hiding it so this is the shoulder that's a filament these are the only two things selected we're going to do a voxel merge with the filament hidden and now we have a hole but it doesn't go through this middle one we're going to select it select this other filament and hide it oh no sorry they do rename themselves uh as you go so did I not duplicate that I didn't but let's undo all right let's find our filament here and let's duplicate it now let's try this again we're going to select our Central joint and do a voxel merge with the filament hidden and we're going to select our bicep and go ahead and filament and do a voxel merge and now we have our completed joint you can see all the way through that's where your filament is going to go even though I did not allow for any kind of of uh tolerance here it's going to fit these this was designed with no tolerance whatsoever and it fit it fits nice and snug and holds in place now if you wanted to um have it loose like this and floppy then you would have scaled and you still can scale this part in on this axis here just a tiny bit just an itty bitty bit like don't go like that do just a fraction now if you want to measure it I'll show you how that's done uh you go to the measure tool go to your top go to one of your side views so you're not all over the place then go to your measure tool and go boop boop two places that's 0.1.0149 you can see how useless this is when you're talking about like you know there's a half a millimeter there 0.42 millimeters but the problem is like if your view is off a little bit and you think you're measuring here to here that says 0.5 millimeters but then if we rotate this around we see that I was actually just measuring wow it actually did work the point is uh it doesn't always measure it measures by The View so it doesn't always measure exactly what you're expecting yeah there's a good one I tried to measure directly across but instead if we look here it's actually five millimeters into that hole that I've measured so I gave up on measuring stuff anyway that is it that is our entire joint let's bring our box back and then hide it and there we go there is our entire joint um ready to go now if you want to test ranges of motion you're going to need to move your pivot around so do things like select your piece hit pivot over here oh sorry select your piece go to Gizmo here hit pivot and then you can just move your pivot to that that hole where the filament is right and then go back to Auto or or hit pivot again and now you can test your range of motion and then you can do things like sculpt to you know open up your range of motion but that right there is how it's done hey there if you like this and you uh want more tutorials be sure to subscribe and if you want to support me go to my patreon and maybe you'll get like videos ahead of time or exclusive files or some junk like that but mostly you'll just help me send game controllers to people with physical disabilities okay thanks bye love you bye foreign

Channel: Caleb Kraft

Views: 31,067

Keywords: diy, maker, nomad sculpt, zbrush, digital sculpt, 3d printing, 3d printer, action figure, how to, tutorial

Id: 12lq8g0mia0

Length: 29min 37sec (1777 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 16 2022