Modeling Tricky Guitar Transitions with CAD | Chris Broderick Pro Series CAD Modeling with Fusion360

in this video we're going to take a look at some of the more complex areas of modeling a guitar in fusion 360. [Music] hey everyone this is matt with learn everything about design and in this video we're going to tackle something that is not car parts but we are going to talk about using surfacing tools and form tools to make complex designs so i had a request come in or a question about modeling some features of this guitar now if you're into guitars or you know what this is this is a chris broderick custom guitar i say custom it's a pro series something you can buy off the shelf but this electric guitar has some features that are somewhat unique that you don't typically see on other guitars so what we're going to talk about specifically is going to be some of the transitions that are happening from the neck of the guitar into the body now these are going to be kind of difficult for us to to model and we've got some details on the top that we're going to talk about as well now we're not going to completely model this guitar but what we are going to do is we are going to talk about some of the things that i would look for when creating a design like this some of the areas that i would use forms some of the areas that i wouldn't use forms and why we want to choose those options because one of the things whenever you're modeling something is you always need to think about the options that you have and why you're making those choices so we're going to get started in fusion 360 and the first thing that i suggest that you do is you just go to your web browser and you just do a search for jackson guitars and this is the chris broderick pro series and you'll get tons of images find one that is forward facing a rear-facing image that you can use as a canvas now in fusion 360 again we're not going to model the entire guitar i just want to focus on a few areas that should give you enough that you can model pretty much anything so we're going to get started for me i'm going to use the inch unit system you don't have to but for me this is what's going to work for me and then i'm going to insert a canvas i'm going to look for the location of the images that i've downloaded you can see that i have a bunch of different ones here i've got a back and a front and what we're going to do is we're going to insert this as a canvas we're going to pick one of the planes and i'm just going to say ok then i want to go to my canvas folder right click and i'm going to calibrate it now if you have a specific dimension on an image then you can get pretty close what i'm going to do is go across the neck of the guitar and i'm going to make that two and a quarter inches and that should be pretty close to get the image to scale keep in mind that when you're using an image you're not going to get an exact scale because you are just picking pixels essentially so you want to get it close and in this case it doesn't matter because we're not making this what we're going to do is we're just going to try to you know worry about the shapes the other thing that i want to do is i'm going to put a canvas image for the back now this isn't necessarily something i need to do but i want to to go ahead and just put this canvas image on the back so that way i have you know sort of a good idea as to what's going on i am going to flip it horizontally so that it does match and i could again i could use the edit or calibrate and you'll notice that it doesn't perfectly line up so we're not going to really be able to use it for reference and what we can do is we can just pull it off to the side and maybe increase that opacity because this one is black it's not going to work out very well but sometimes you can just add additional reference images because it is so dark and it is on a black background i'm going to hit cancel and not insert it but just keep in mind if you do find some good images of the front and the back of the guitar then you will be able to go ahead and place those in and use them as references now that we have this kind of set up the first thing that i want to do is i want to create the outside profile of this now this can be very tricky because essentially what we're going to end up doing is we're going to be using a spline now we've talked about splines before on this channel and to get started we're going to create a sketch and when we look at the splines that we have under the create menu there are two different types we've got fitpoint spline and a control point spline now the control point spline generally will be easier for us to get nice clean curvature but the fit point spline is going to be easier for us to essentially trace around the guitar so we're going to use the point spline in this example and i'm going to give you some tips on ways that you can make sure that your curvature is nice and smooth so we're going to start over here where we've got this nice broad curve and generally what you want to think about is having points before and after your inflection points and what i mean by inflection points is these are going to be areas where you're changing the direction of curvature or you've got the maximum amount of radius of curvature so again i'm going to start over here and i'm just going to put one in the middle and i'm going to just kind of work my way around and you'll notice that if you click sometimes it's going to accept that spline we can do this in multiple splines but it's going to be good for us to practice by doing this in a single spline so i'm going to hit escape select that and hit delete and then i'm going to start again so again we're just going to pick a couple points and i'm going to work my way around and remember that we can move these points around after the fact but we just want to get relatively close get close to that that change in curvature as we get closer to these tight transitions it's going to be trickier so we're going to have to come back and make some adjustments there so we've got that shape there and i'm going to click to say okay and when we take a look at this as we take a look at the shape here this is a little tricky because if we look at the back of the guitar and i'll bring an image over here the back of the guitar is sort of smooth like this whereas the front of the guitar is blending in to the neck so we have to think about what that curvature is really doing what it really means so if you're going to model this from the front then you have to be sort of mindful of that shape if you're going to model the back of it and sometimes it's good to have that back reference image now what's actually happening here is these are going to come down and they're going to come back and back over so in order to kind of stick with that and make sure that i have you know a sort of a good reference i'm going to delete this now that we played around with a little bit i am going to insert another canvas i am going to use this white guitar i'm going to use the same plane i'm going to just scale it up in here and i'm going to rotate it and i am going to flip it horizontally so we're going to rotate it until it's in about the right position we're going to scale it up it doesn't have to be perfect we just want to kind of get it close so you can see that these are going 5 degrees every time probably going to need something like one or two degrees and we are kind of relying on a picture now the picture is not going to give us the perfect scale but again we're only doing this just to sort of have these references so that's going to give us a little bit better idea of that shape because we can now see on the back side how we've got that smooth transition so let's try the spline one more time again it's always good to practice so let's go ahead and let's just work our way through here again sort of picking these points and working around i'm not going to worry about this sort of cut out on the back side that's something that you can do after the fact if you want we really want to get the the major shape of this i'm going to kind of work my way around and as we get back to this point when we click on it it's going to automatically apply tangency and we can hit escape to get off our spline tool now the first thing that we want to do here is we want to select it and turn on our curvature combs i'm going to increase the density and what we should see is nice smooth curvature combs you can see that as we change direction here i've got them relatively smooth i can increase the scale if it helps and the area that we really want to fix the one area that's really bad on this at least for me is this one right here that's something that i do want to fix so i'm going to leave the curvature comes on and i'm going to pull this point out and you can see how the curvature comb has changed but there's this little dip in it right here when we look at the one on the right hand side it doesn't look like that it's pretty much straight here wraps around this one over here has got that bump and i want to fix that so i'm going to move these these points around until i smooth that out so this is something that you want to look for when you're using this type of spline and again the the fit point spline is going to be a bit harder to get smooth curvature if you're going to use the other type of spline which is the control point then what you're doing is you're creating the cage on the outside which is a perfectly valid way to do this and it's going to give you a nice smooth result but note that when we go back and we we actually close this off we are going to have to add a tangency a curvature continuous relationship or a co-linear relationship between these edges again we're not going to be using this so i'm not too concerned about it but that is something that you're going to want to control because we've got a sharp intersection there so i'm going to select that and delete that and i'm going to focus on this once i'm happy with the curvature i'm going to select it and turn the curvature comes off because honestly they can get kind of annoying anytime we view the sketch so now that we can finish the sketch the next thing for us to do is to turn this into a body and we can just extrude this up but obviously the guitar is going to have some sort of shape to the top and likely the bottom the bottom is going to be mostly flat but the top will have some shape to it so remember when we're looking at this the top is is going to be in this orientation you can see this matches our picture pretty well so what we're going to do is we're going to extrude this up as a surface so one of the reasons i want to use this as a surface is because it's going to help me when we start to use forms to create the outside shape so we need to decide how big the guitar is going to be in this case what i'm going to do is just go two inches that's going to be thicker than it actually needs to be but that's going to give me a good reference point and then i'm going to use patch and i'm going to patch the back side of this and because we extruded it and we drew this on a plane the back side is going to be a planar face automatically i'm going to stitch those two together this is going to create one surface it's still open on the top and now this gives us the control to create the outside surface now you might be thinking to yourself we've covered this with forms we can use extrude and forms and we could have just made this with a form body the problem that happens when we use forms is if we use extrude on a form the tolerance that you end up getting you can see here with a very small number of faces it's not even close to being the right shape if we increase this let's go up to 40. as soon as we increase that we're going to get closer to the shape but it's still not quite right now ideally we want a uniform distribution but that's going to get even worse so you're going to have to use curvature distribution which means it's going to bunch up edges in these corners and ultimately you're not going to get the quite the same shape that you do when you're talking about just extruding a surface so for something like that we really want to focus our attention on using an extruded surface because we're going to get closer to that spline but for the outside face that has some curvature to it we can use a form so i'm going to use the plane option and i'm just going to draw a big rectangle that's larger than this you can see that i picked the wrong plane that's okay i can rotate it so we're going to go to modify select the entire body and we want to rotate this thing just 90 degrees all right so once we have the entire thing rotated i'll go back to my all options and now i want to start to make the curvature make the shape of the the outside face of the guitar however it's probably easier for us to add edges while it's completely flat and then begin to manipulate it so when we're looking at the shape of this guitar what we want to do is we want to think about where the light is you can kind of see that we've got a lighter section here and a lighter section here and i want edges there so that i can control the curvature essentially what we're going to be doing is using this top face to ultimately build an entire solid body so obviously we don't have the edges where we need them so what we're going to do is we're going to start adding them so first i'm going to go to insert edge i'm going to double click this middle edge and what i want to do is i want to put one right here and the reason i want to put one right here is because this is where we're changing direction so as i create new edges and new divisions that is going to be an inflection point for me so i'm going to say ok for that one you'll notice that it moves it up we want to take a look at this in box display so we're going to go to display mode box display which is alt and 1 on the keyboard and you'll notice in box display it puts that edge exactly where we want it we're going to take care of making sure that in smooth display it's in the right place but for right now i'm going to go to modify insert point and what i want to do is i want to select a point on this upper edge i'm going to come down to here and try to sort of mimic that shape and then i'm going to come over here and then i'm going to come down to this bottom edge and say okay so again what we're doing is we're going to break this up so that we can start to control the curvature we're going to use a right-click menu and repeat insert point i'm going to come up here and i'm going to try to start getting that curvature you'll notice we really want a point to sort of turn here so we're going to have to add another division and the way we're going to do that again is by double clicking on the bottom edge and we'll use insert edge now at this point it's important to note that we're using the simple insertion mode the plane that we're working on is completely flat we haven't adjusted any curvature yet so exact or simple will actually give us the same result in this case in most cases you want to be mindful of simple versus exact but again in this case it's not too bad we're going to insert another point this time we're going to change its direction here hit enter and then we want to select this other edge that we don't want sometimes this can be difficult depending on the angle you're viewing this at and you might want to zoom in select it and hit delete okay so now we've got the edges divided up where we want this thing is still completely flat i'm going to hide the image for right now and i want to go back and forth between smooth and box display just so we can see this so alton 3 on the keyboard you can kind of see how those edges change and what i want to do in smooth display is go to utilities and make uniform and then i want to make note of where those edges are so alton one then back to alton three and they've pulled a little bit closer to uniform relative to the box display and we haven't changed any curvature yet so now's the time where we want to begin to change the curvature i'm going to go to modify edit form and i'm going to use the body option and i want to pull this entire body down just a little bit so i'm going to pull it down 0.1 so it's just inside of that surface you can pull it down as much as you want keeping in mind how thick you want the guitar body to be this is still probably a bit too thick because i made it two inches originally so i'm going to go down half an inch actually as i'm looking at this and that's a good starting point so then we're going to go to the all option which allows us to grab faces edges or vertices and start to add curvature now if you remember if we bring that image back it begins to sort of roll down on the sides here and it rolls down on the sides over here as well so the first thing that we can do is we can double click this edge and just pull it down we can do the same thing over here double click this edge and just pull it down now it's not perfect because it's just a very sort of gradual transition i'm going to double click this edge and pull that down just a little bit you might want to zoom in just so it's not pulling it down too drastically and go back and forth between box and smooth display so just to kind of take a look so that looks pretty good so far it's a very gradual transition and if we want to have a harder transition then we need to add additional edges because essentially what we're doing here is we're controlling the curvature going into and out of these edges there's another display mode that allows us to see the basically see the curvature the surface here is the smooth display and this on the outside is the box display this gives us sort of some good insight into what this looks like and if we want to make any changes so for example that vertex right there i'm going to use modify edit form and i'm going to manually pull it down a bit i'm going to do the same thing over here pull that down a little bit just to kind of change the shape and maybe even take the center one and pull it down just a little bit alright so that looks pretty good next i want to insert some additional edges so back to my box display just take a look at the overall shape see if i want to make any adjustments this is all flat which is not generally a good idea whenever you're working in forms you want to make sure that you don't just have flat space here so this means i'm going to take this vertex down a little bit and then i'm going to double click on this edge and take this entire edge down just a little bit and i'm going to take this edge down just a little bit as well and what i'm looking to do is to make sure that i don't just have a straight transition here and if i want to i can take this front edge down just a hair and just that little bit will help make sure that we've got nice smooth curvature all right so that's a lot of little adjustments now let's take care of tightening up that crease so in order to do that we're going to double click on this edge insert an edge but this time we're going to put it relatively close we don't want to have it right on top of it because then it's going to give us a very hard crease but we want it somewhere you know about there visually i'm going to use control and 4 on the keyboard to hide the edges and we can start to see that transition now if that's too close then we can double click on it use modify and slide edge and we can pull it away a little bit and watch it soften that up i'm going to use ctrl and 6 on the keyboard to bring it back you can also use your display settings visual style shaded and shaded with visible edges those are the two that i'm bouncing back and forth between so that way i can kind of see this without the edges obscuring it so control ctrl 6 will bring them back and we're going to do the same thing on the other side so insert an edge and again we want to kind of plan where that is and remember that we don't want anything that's perfectly flat so we are going to use edit form and bring that down just a little bit we're going to do the same thing over here essentially when we have a flat section between two edges it's going to not give us the appropriate curvature it's going to try to essentially control the surface and what's going to end up happening if you've got a flat section here is the curvature itself is going to have a lot of tension the surface is going to have tension so you you just end up with some bad results and you kind of want to avoid that if if at all possible so back to a smooth display control and four to hide the edges and now we're starting to get something that looks looks pretty good now we could spend a lot of time messing around with this i don't really want to get too deep into to sort of playing around with this but i do want to talk about ways in which we can make some adjustments so first i'm going to go to insert point i'm going to go from here and i want to bring this over just a bit so that it crosses that that portion of the body i'm going to hit enter and then delete this edge i'm going to go to my smooth display control and 4 and now what we've we've done is we've just sort of softened that up in this area and we've transitioned it or moved where it is on the guitar so again that's kind of the idea control and six to bring those back alton one box display and what i'm going to do is do this one more time this time i'm going to take this one i'm going to come over to the left a little bit and go back to my smooth display and just take a look so you can see now that crease is a bit tighter down here and it blends away making this just sort of a larger face here and it blends you know kind of into that side so that's that's a pretty good result so far i'm pretty happy with that we can obviously add a lot more detail but if we take a look at the picture again let's go ahead and bring it back it pretty much captures what we want it's not perfect because we could toss another edge in here and we can control that curvature if we want but you could you could end up spending a ton of time so what i'm going to do is i'm going to double click on this edge i'm going to go to insert edge i'm going to use the exact insertion method i'm going to do minus 0.5 so it puts it up here i'm going to say okay and when we use exact when we're inserting those edges what that's actually doing is it's making adjustments to ensure that the shape of the surface the the form body that we have here is that it's staying exactly the same if we were to use the simple insertion mode it's going to make changes to the shape and put that edge exactly where we want it and sometimes you want to keep the shape the same sometimes you want to allow it to to actually change so the reason i added that one is because we've got this transition here and i think what i want to do is go to insert point i'm going to come from here i'm going to come up and then back over to this point i'm going to double click this edge and then hit delete so back to smooth display control and 4 and just take a look at the surface so essentially we just added a little bit of an extra corner there last thing i want to do here is i want to go to make uniform on this and again you're not going to see anything until we go to box display and back to smooth display but essentially what we're doing is we're taking the just the the spacing of these faces in smooth display and we're just getting them a little bit closer to how we have it in box display trying to make everything a bit more uniform uniform four-sided that is is going to be the goal nice and smooth transitions we don't want to you don't want to upset the curvature too bad so now we've got something that has some shape to it i'm going to finish the form which is going to convert it to a surface and now we're going to use a tool called boundary fill you could also trim and stitch things together to turn it into a solid but boundary fill will allow us to select surfaces solids and planes and then we can simply pick the cells that we want to keep and it'll turn that into a solid body for us this is also nice because it allows us to keep those surfaces and we've got our solid body here so you can see that we're left with a solid body for the guitar and go back to my solid tools and start to work on it first thing i want to do is save this so i'm going to go ahead and make sure that i save this so i don't lose anything i'm just going to call this cb guitar for chris broderick and now we've got our file to keep working on all right so the next thing for me is going to be to make the neck now a lot of these guitars are actually going to have a neck that is bolted on or removable i don't have this guitar so i don't exactly know but from the pictures it looks like the neck and the body are one piece now i i've found a couple pictures and let me go ahead and try to pull one up so we can take a look so this picture here if we zoom in the way in which the body blends up into the neck and is smooth here to me that looks like it's all one piece the way that it transitions in it doesn't look like it actually bolts on so that's something that we need to keep in mind as we're designing this so what i'm going to do is i want to create that so we're going to start by just sketching here now the guitar is upside down so i'm going to flip it over because that curvature part there that is the top and the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to start with a line just a horizontal line out remember when we scaled our image i made that two and a quarter so that's going to be the width of it and then i'm going to go to a front view or a top view and i just want to position that left to right so that it's in approximately the right position for the neck so once i have that in approximately the right position and come back to this view and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to use my line tool i'm going to find the midpoint which is that triangle reference and i'm just going to draw a vertical line turn it into construction and the reason i want to do this is because i want to dimension the distance between my origin and where that is i'm just going to say 0.1 so that way i know that this line can't float left and right it can only float up and down i also don't need that line to be there it can be construction because what we're going to do is we're going to create the rest of the neck now i'm not going to get real deep into creating a bunch of crazy profiles or anything like that because there's a lot of different shapes that we can get around and do here but what i want to do is i want to think about where this is going to hit the rest of the guitar because that is going to be important so we're going to use our line tool and i'm going to make a vertical line here i'm going to make a vertical line here and then i'm going to create an arc on top go from this point to this point and right click and say okay so now we want to use some constraints i'm going to make these two vertical lines equal that's automatically going to make sure that their endpoints are horizontal so all i need to do is dimension their height and the arc or the radius of that so we're going to pick a height that works in this case i'm going to say eighth inch you can see that puts that straight just above our top of our guitar then i'm going to hit escape and i'm going to start to pull this down and just get something that looks about right and then d to dimension this looks like about 12 inches will work and then we're going to just bring this up and find that that position that we want it in and then we can dimension the horizontal line from the origin looks like about point six the last thing for me to do is to to create a spline i'm going to use a fit point spline here in general i probably would not use a fit point spline for something like this but i want to add a tangency between this and the vertical line when you do this make sure that you select the spline if you grab the green handle that's fine but you want to make sure you use something like horizontal vertical or co-linear we also want to make sure that the spline handles on these vertical sections are equal and i also want to make sure that this one here is horizontal because i want this to be a symmetric shape and then i'm going to use a construction line i'm going to find the midpoint here and i'm going to attach it to that another thing we could do is we could use coincident between this vertical reference line and this point and it's going to shift it over for us so those constraints a lot of times you can just sort of pick and choose what you want for the constraint that's going to give us enough flexibility this cannot move left and right it can only move up and down and if we want to we can come in and we can dimension the the handles we can increase or decrease them however we want to adjust the shape same thing down here we can sort of move those around but the only thing that we can do right now is move this up and down and adjust the weight or the influence of those handles because that's not really important to me here all i'm going to do is dimension the distance here at 0.9 i'm going to give these a width value just so that i can say that it's fully defined and we'll do the same thing over here make that 0.5 and now you can see the spline is fully defined so we're going to finish the sketch i'm going to hide the canvas image and we're going to extrude this so e on the keyboard as i pull this out you can see it's trying to cut away now generally what i would do if i were creating this you know how most electric guitars are i would actually come in and make this a separate body but because i know they're joined together i'm just going to use the join option however i do want to make sure that it starts just in front of those pickups so i am going to use an offset option on the profile plane and i'm going to try to do two inches and it looks like maybe two and a half or three inches is going to get me a little bit closer so if we view this here you can see we're pretty close maybe 3.125 3.25 i could have also just made a plane there but again this is this is going to be okay for what we're doing you'll notice that in the image the guitar shape is a little bit different so i do need to make an adjustment to that i want to make sure that this is completely inside the body so i'm going to just make some adjustments based on where that falls on this design to make sure it's completely inside so that looks okay we can adjust the location of the sketch we can raise or lower that however we want but at this point that looks pretty good so i'm gonna do a quick save and now is the time for us to talk about the transition because that's going to be the hard part now i'm going to start by doing the transition on the bottom and then we can move on to those cuts that happen on the top so on the bottom of this guitar let's go ahead and bring this image back this doesn't really tell the whole story from this view the other view of the back side kind of shows where those sections blend in so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a sketch i can pick any planar face or a sketch plane and then i'm just going to use my line tool and i want to figure out where that intersects i'm going to come through there with a line i am going to go through the neck of the guitar wherever this comes comes through and then down through this portion of the body and say okay now you notice i didn't dimension anything that's okay because we're just doing stuff visually right now i'm going to split face and what i want to do is i want to split this face right here and i'm also going to go ahead and split the neck of the guitar and i'm going to use that sketch we just created allow it to extend and say okay let's go ahead and hide the canvas image and what we did here is we essentially we just split the faces up it's still one solid body we didn't break it into multiple pieces we just split the face up the next thing for me to do is to actually split this face up a little bit better and the main reason i want to do that is because we're going to create a loft and when we loft from here down to this face we have a nice smooth profile here and a sharp corner and that's going to cause problems in our geometry so what we want to do is we want to break this face up to something that more matches this shape so in order to do that we're going to create a new sketch this can be done on the end of the neck or we can just pick a plane it doesn't really matter as long as it's looking at this this face here then we're going to use create project include project and i'm going to bring this edge this edge and this bottom edge in because i want to use those as tangency references so i'm going to use a spline i'm going to come from the top i'm going to come down to this edge and back over here then i'm going to escape to get off my spline tool and just sort of begin to manipulate these handles but essentially what we're doing is we're making them tangent with these these are vertical lines based on how we split the face up it projected our sketch so we could use vertical horizontal for these handles we can make this one horizontal because we know the bottom is flat and this just gives us again a face or a section where we can transition to so now once again we're going to use split face faces to split are going to be that portion of the body and the sketch is going to be that spline and we're going to say okay so at this point i would typically transition over to surfaces and what i would say is that i want to select and delete that face it's going to turn this entire thing into a surface and then i want to get rid of this now one thing that happens is i can't really get rid of this piece here because we didn't split it up just yet so if we want to split that face up what we should do before we delete this is we should try to use split face we should try to split this face right here and the splitting tool is going to be this face now oftentimes this will cause problems we're going to allow it to extend which should allow it to push up and then it'll give us a division there so now we can go back and delete that face and we can select these and delete those as well using delete on the keyboard or going to modify and delete so once again now we're dealing with surfaces these are all open i'm going to go to create loft i'm going to select these three edges for my first side or my profile and then my second side i'm going to select this right here let's go ahead and rotate this around all right so let's go ahead and pull this down that first profile we want to make sure we have at least tangency and the second one we want tangency as well so now if we take a look at this that looks pretty good that looks like the transition that we expected to see you can see that it's pretty close it's not perfect it looks pretty good down here if we want to make some adjustments to it what you can do is you can play around with the tangency weight so for example if i make this 1.5 that means that i've got more influence coming from the neck and that allows me to sort of push it down a bit farther if i make it one you can see that it comes up and that's true for all of our profiles as long as we're using an edge of a surface as our selection because it's going to take the surface as that tangency driver if we're using a sketch then it's not going to work so everything looks pretty good there i'm going to say ok one thing that we should keep in mind and actually we should go back into that loft that i didn't mention is these options here for free edges if we say aligned edges you'll notice that it changes the way that that edge is being created when we use free edges there's a little bit of a wrinkle there aligned edges oftentimes will give us a better result i'm going to use aligned edges on both of those and say okay and then that means that this is going to be a little bit cleaner it does sometimes produce problems it's kind of a case-by-case phases but i'm going to go ahead and stitch all this together say ok and now we just have these openings to take care of now we're going to trim a lot of this away but i'm going to try to use the patch tool and just let it patch that and you'll notice that it's giving us an issue and mainly because this section that we cut away i just canceled that the section that we cut away right here that is higher than this so in order to smooth this out we need to figure out how to to sort of blend those together now a couple different ways that we can do this one we can try to go to create and ruled this allows us to create a surface that is tangent or at a specific direction and the reason that we would use ruled is because this allows us to create a new surface so i can start to pull this out and if i pick a point it's going to measure that as a distance and because of the way we split everything up that'll give me a fairly good result i can say okay and this gets me a new surface here but then i need to figure out how to trim this one other thing we can do is we can select that we can go to ruled and now instead of norm tangent we can do normal that will allow us to pull this out and use it as a trim now there are some potential issues that happen with this because we're now breaking this clean edge up this means that we are potentially causing issues with that edge when we create another surface but in this design we're actually cutting it away so i'm not too worried about it so i can use that as a trim tool then i can get rid of this this tiny section here it does produce problems because we already knitted everything together if that's the case you can always go to split face faces to split splitting tool we don't need to extend it in this case unless it doesn't completely extend through so sometimes that will be the case let's try it one more time split face splitting tool allow it to extend and then if we hide that last body you can see now we've got this division on it let's select it and delete it all right so all that extra work just for that geometry you can see it's not perfect on the other side we still need to extend this so let's select that edge go to ruled surface make sure it's tangent we're going to select this point we'll say okay and we should be able to just delete that because it was extended from the other side and then we'll stitch everything together so a lot of times when you have something like this that you're trying to kind of model or recreate having it on hand is extremely valuable because you can actually see these little details and figure out how they're you know how they kind of go together we don't have that luxury because we're only using pictures so at this point i'm going to try to use patch and because that edge is now in line with the surface it should be nice and clean i can repeat the process on the other side and then i can stitch these together now as soon as i stitch these together what's going to happen is it's going to turn this into a solid body so we're back to a solid body again now we've got that bottom section that's nice and smooth the next thing we need to do is we need to sort of make those uh those cuts so these cuts here on the top side those can be pretty tricky again because of how they blend into the rest of the housing so um it's gonna it's gonna take a little bit of work let's go ahead and save this and let's think about a couple different ways that we can do this so a couple ways that we can do this is one we can do a loft because loft allows us to go from a point so we can go from this point over to this point or actually wherever that detail ends up so if we bring our guitar picture back you can see over here it goes right up to the neck and it actually blends away over here so this one again depending on the geometry or the size it can go pretty far out this one over here is a bit narrower but i'm not going to spend a ton of time getting it perfect but i just want to give you a couple techniques that you can use so one technique is to do the sweep and or the the loft and one technique is to do a sweep there's probably other ones but these are probably the two common ones that you would go toward so the first one i'm going to do an offset plane i'm going to select this and i'm just going to sort of pull this over and what i'm looking to do is get this in roughly the center of whatever that detail is going to be so i'm going to say okay i'm going to create a sketch on this let's go ahead and rotate this over and i'm going to use the slice option it's going to not create a section view it'll just be temporary we're going to create a line and then this line is going to represent where that cut is going to go through the body so once we figure out where that is then we're going to use the construct plane along path option we'll select this we'll put this all the way at the end so 0 or 1 depending on which direction of the selection and we're going to select this and create a new sketch what we want to do from here is we want to create that v so we can do this with a conic or we can do this with a spline i'm going to go ahead and do this with a spline but i'll show you the conic as well we'll say okay and what i want to do is i want to use horizontal vertical on this edge here hit escape and then just sort of play around with the shape so this maybe we need to bring it over this one here maybe needs to come over a little bit if we go to create we have something called a conic curve and a conic curve when you think about this this is essentially a plane slicing through a cylindrical cone so the closer we are to one the steeper the angle is the closer we are to going up through the center of the cone the closer we are to zero we're essentially getting a straight line now this is a bit tricky to visualize i don't really use those very often but it is a good way to get that sort of deeper v here i'm going to finish the sketch and then from the surface menu i'm going to use sweep we're going to sweep our spline along the single path and then we can kind of look where it hits the guitar and figure out if we need to make any adjustments so you can kind of see that it's not perfect because we don't really have a great way to to sort of get it right up to the neck of the guitar so this is one method that we can use i'm going to hide that surface another method that we can use does involve this line but what we're going to do is we're going to create a sketch you can pick any plane you want because in this case what we're going to do is include 3d geometry so i'm going to select include 3d geometry i'm going to take this point here and that point right there and then what we're going to do is create a loft now loft allows us to go from points as well as profiles so it gives us a way to get directly up next to the neck here and go through that that little profile that we made so this is a great way where we can really control the end of that geometry so i'm going to say ok and now that i have that i can use split body because this is a solid body body is to split the splitting tool is going to be my surface we're going to say ok and you'll notice that it didn't work so let's try it one more time i'm going to go to split body solid body my splitting tool i'm going to turn off the extend option and see if it works without it so when we turn off the extend now we've got this little piece here we can remove it it can hide that surface and you can see that we made that cut through the guitar so that looks pretty good it probably could go a little bit farther we could play around with the point and maybe add some additional points but i'd say overall that shape looks pretty good it carries up over here and that looks looks like it gives us some pretty good geometry so we're going to do the same thing on the other side we're going to create an offset plane put it in roughly the center location of whatever feature it is you're making so in this case looks like probably two and a quarter is going to be about right and then again we're going to create a sketch i'm going to use the slice option it just kind of helps me visually and then again i'm just going to create the the line that's going to be essentially the cut that goes through here and then once again we're going to go and create a new sketch again doesn't matter what plane we're doing for these sketches because we're just including 3d geometry and you don't actually need to turn on the 3d sketch option to do this you only need to have 3d sketch turned on if you happen to be sketching in 3d which we're not doing here now this one's a little bit tricky because we don't actually have a point far enough away so when we look at this you can see this is kind of up here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to include that edge and then i'm going to place a point on it now because i'm going to place a point on it now i'm going to want to turn on my 3d sketch option i'm going to select point i'm just going to place a point there right click and say ok that gives me that point out in space i'm going to turn 3d sketch back off and then we're going to go to loft so once again pick my point my line and the other point i want to go to that's going to create that that nice little cut surface for me go to split body bodies to split this is my tool extend doesn't need to be turned on you can see in this case it fails and again this is going to happen sometimes depending on where the surfaces hit if this point exactly hits this edge it might be good for us to maybe trim it or make some adjustments one thing that you can do that's kind of quick and easy is you can use the offset option and you can take this and you can offset it a very small amount another thing that you can do is you can take this and you can use move copy we want to reset our pivot point because we don't want the pivot point to be normal to that surface we might want to make sure that it's aligned to something else and then just go up a small amount let's say .02 and sometimes just moving it a little bit away from other geometry will allow you to make that cut so we're going to do split body bodies to split splitting tool let's try one more time and you can see now it works so really it was the end of this surface that was hitting this edge it was causing us problems didn't have a problem on the other side but for some reason it did here so now we can take that we can right click and remove it we don't want to delete it because we actually need that geometry to still remain in the timeline but we can just kind of use the remove option so again i could spend a lot more time trying to get this transition better i could add more points or or really work on that surface transition we could loft from more than a point we could loft from this edge if we wanted to and and have it sort of transition around but that gives you a general idea of how to make that so i know that was probably not the best walk-through or the best tutorial but i wanted to highlight a handful of tools that are kind of helpful and kind of needed to make geometry like this so there's a couple tricky things with this guitar one is this blend again because the neck and the body are all one piece and the other is kind of making these cuts now they seem simple and honestly if you're making this by hand that's kind of a really simple geometry that you can do just by sanding however when we're talking about modeling and getting really close up to the neck of this that's where things get a little tricky now i can't promise that this is a perfect representation of this guitar because again we just kind of made some judgment calls along the way but this should get you a little bit closer to some of that tricky geometry if you have any questions or you like to see stuff like this that is not car related or if you have any tricky models things that are giving you problems and you maybe want an opinion on on different ways that you can model that geometry by all means please let me know you can send me an email support caducator.com you can leave a comment on the video and as always thanks for watching and we'll see in the next one [Music]

Channel: Learn Everything About Design

Views: 1,749

Keywords: Fusion 360, CAD, Modeling, Design, Guitar, Chris Broderick, Complex Modeling, Complex Design, Surfacing, Surface modeling, Forms, Tsplines, SubD, Subdivided

Id: aClYdrm87uM

Length: 49min 29sec (2969 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2022