SOLVED: How to model the PERFECT Asymmetrical Headstock Transition | Guitars in Fusion 360

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel ever since i posted my new headstock transition method many of you have reached out to me with problems you're running into trying to use it on your designs well this week i spent some time really troubleshooting this and i feel like an apology is in order after i had that breakthrough i got so excited to share what i had discovered that i actually neglected to include a really critical feature the neck taper so the lines that connected my headstock to my neck were horizontal rather than tapered like they should be this led me to use the extrude command for simplicity's sake on helper surfaces but that actually isn't the proper method when designing this on an actual guitar with a neck taper so first off i sincerely apologize for giving you information that you might not have been able to use and second i also discovered some redundant steps in the process and found an easier way to model this without the use of the intersection curve which will end up making our sketching process much simpler so today we're going to fix my mistake and i'm also going to show you how this method can be used on asymmetrical and angled headstock designs as well okay so jumping into the design workspace let's take a look at what you need to get started now in the previous video i had you extrude this surface back to use as a helper surface well if you have your neck already modeled up until that point extruding that helper surface is kind of unnecessary as the neck can serve as our helper surface and also provide our taper now it's not necessary to have your heel transition already modeled all that really matters is that we have the main portion of the neck set up so that way we can use it as a helper surface once you're at this point we can go ahead and start sketching so i'm actually going to sketch this with you guys from scratch so you can actually see my sketching process and how i lay these out so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to create a plane at angle on the nut line and this is where we're going to set our neck break angle so let's go negative 10 degrees that we can always come back and change this because it will be parametric hit ok and then let's sketch on that plane now that we're sketching on that plane let's go ahead and project in the nut line and let's hide our fretboard so that way we don't get our sum of our lines confused now what i can do is draw basically a rough rectangle and i'm going to end up aligning these and actually i need to bring back the fretboard sketch and then we can project in these two lines from the nut and if you don't have that you can project in the lines from your fretboard so let's go ahead and project these two in now what's going to happen is you'll notice that because we're at an angle it's actually projecting those in at an angle which is perfect because that means we can now make these two lines collinear so make those collinear and those collinear and we'll go ahead and make this one vertical and now we can go ahead and define the overall length of our headstock i'll make this seven inches and now we can go ahead and make these construction lines so they don't impact our design and go create three-point arc and we're going to create it from this point out to here and i'm going to create another one down here now we're going to make these two separate because this is going to be an asymmetrical design so i'm going to go ahead and say one inch on this one and i'm going to go and say five inches on this one and then now we just need to connect it so another three point arc and i'm going to go to the point here make that tangent and now it just needs to know how high does this point need to come so i'm going to give that a dimension of 0.75 inches come back to three-point arc from here to here make that tangent to the construction line from here to here and make it tangent to this construction line but this one's not going to be tangent now you this is obviously my headstock design so you don't have to draw it exactly like this the main thing is that if you're doing an asymmetrical design make sure that these are dimensioned separately otherwise feel free to use whatever design you need and then i'm going to make this 0.75 from here so that makes it fully constrained and then do i want where do i want this to fall i'm just going to make it the same as the other one and go 0.75 inches so that's the design we're going to work with and we will be able to come back and change these and it will still remain parametric up until a certain point and i will show you guys that in a little bit so now we're going to draw our volute so i'm going to use the three arc method i still feel like that is the best approach for this rather than a spline and we will draw an arc here and make sure that it's tangent to this wing right here and then we will draw another arc that is tangent to this wing right here and then we will draw a third arc for the volute that connects these two and we need to make sure they're tangent here which is already automatically applied and make these two tangent got a little away from me there so now what we need to do is we need to make this touch the nut line now that's where a lot of people got hung up when they tried to do this on an asymmetrical design because on a symmetrical design you can just make this a midpoint to here but and that makes these two um end points vertical to each other now on an asymmetrical design that's really not the case and that's actually not what we care about what we care about so the design intent is that we care that this arc is tangent to the nut and that the peak the furthest point on the top of the arc is touching that center line that's really what we care about so what we can do is we can click this arc and this point and make them coincident let's try that again coincident there we go and then we you'll notice that this arc can breach past that we need to make sure that it can't breach past it because otherwise how we cut our surfaces or use an intersection curve or anything like that won't really work so what we need to do is select these two and make them tangent now what that's going to do is it's going to make sure that the peak of that arc is touching the nut line and then it's also going to be tangent so now all that's left to do as you can see i can still drag it even though it looks fully constrained all we need to do is give this a dimension and the whole thing will be locked down so we'll do 0.625 and the last thing we're going to want to do is just give ourselves a construction line across the center and we're going to use that to help us make some perpendicular constraints on the next sketch so go ahead and close this out and now we're going to draw on the side profile so if i hit sketch and i sketch on this plane let's rotate this over what we can do is project in this line right here that center line that we just did and draw a point up the height that you would like your headstock to be or the thickness rather so 0.625 inches in my case and make sure that it's perpendicular so that automatically applied but really what you want is you want to select that line and that line and then come up here and hit perpendicular constraint now if you didn't do that and you just hit vertical you'll notice that that's actually going to throw off our angle on this headstock so we actually don't want that so it needs to be perpendicular and then we can draw another art or not an arc another line over and then what we want to do is we want to project in the closest wing so the point of the closest wing right there and we're going to make these two we're going to connect these two with a construction line and make that perpendicular so we're going to go right here make these two perpendicular and make sure that's construction line and then we're going to make these two perpendicular but now what we can do is go ahead and draw our arc so from here to here make sure that it's tangent and then what we can do is project in so if i hide my sketches i can actually we'll not use this we'll use the sketches not the surface we'll project in that point and we'll create an arc from here to here like that and actually we will project in the center line of our neck so then we can hide that and make these tangent what that's going to do is that's going to ensure that this arc has us perfectly smooth transition from the neck up and then what we need to do is create a construction line from here to that peak of the volute and once again we need to make that perpendicular not vertical so let's go ahead and make here to here perpendicular make that a construction line and now we just need to define the height here so we'll say one inch that's a little too pointy for me so let's do 0.875 that looks a little better and then we can go ahead and draw a vertical line not a perpendicular line because now we are drawing on the area that is not at the neck angle and then we can connect this line to this line and make sure that this is horizontal now everything is fully constrained and i have everything i need and this sketch is closed off so let's go ahead and hit finish okay so now we're ready to start modeling one last thing i want to show you before we actually extrude or loft or patch anything is this is one addition i've made to this process so before i just extruded this surface so let me grab that i just extruded that up until this point but you'll notice if you zoom in on it really closely it doesn't actually touch the nut line and that's because it doesn't take into account the next tape neck taper angle and that's a problem a lot of you ran into and so what i ended up doing was creating one more neck profile arc on the nut line and gave myself an additional helper surface or helper arc so that way i can just simply loft between these two so we can go create loft bring back our fretboard sketch and we can use this as a rail just to make sure everything stays lined up hit ok and we're going to do the same thing on this side so instead of just doing it on one side we're going to do it on both sides because we're not going to be mirroring each side of the transition over to the other because it's an asymmetrical design so let's go create loft from here to here and use this as a rail as well so now if i zoom in on this you can see that it's actually coming perfectly coincident to that line rather than missing it like before so let's go ahead and bring back our neck and now we can go ahead and start working on the transition so in the previous video i used the intersection curve technique and i still think that is an incredibly powerful way to give you geometry that you otherwise couldn't draw like 3d sketches or complex curves splines etc but actually if we understand the concept of the intersection curve which is essentially extruding this out right and then extruding this up we can actually do the same thing with just extruding and split face so i'm actually going to show you guys the same idea but without the intersection curve so what we're going to do is we're actually going to extrude these three arcs but not the wings we're going to extrude those up and we're going to extrude them up to object this object right here or this one right here we just need it to come to the top of our headstock thickness hit ok and now what we can do let's bring back those sketches and now what we can do is extrude these lines over just like we did before disable chaining these two lines two object this line here actually we need to make this two sided and this one to that point right there so just like before where we closed off that section we did the same thing but here we're not using the intersection curve we're just going to use our surfaces and split them with the sketch which we already did in the previous episode but we no longer by doing it this way ahead of time we actually don't even need the intersection curve so now what i can do is go ahead and modify split face and we will select this surface and this surface as the faces to split and then our splitting tool will be the volute sketch and if we hide that previous body that we just made we can use these three lines right here to split the entire thing all in one go hit okay and then now we can go ahead and delete these surfaces because we don't need them anymore and bring our other one back so now we have everything but the actual headstock transition modeled and we were able to do that in less steps than we were before so there's one more helper surface we need to create and in the previous video i extruded let me disable chaining again that always gets me i extruded that out and the problem a lot of you ran into and i ran into as well when working on an asymmetrical design is occasionally when you do this it doesn't actually end up theoretically touching that and it won't let you select these other surfaces so what we can do instead actually is hide our sketches for a moment and what we can do let's work on the left side first so let's go ahead and create loft between our neck profile and this half of the arc and then we can use a rail which is right here and then we want to make sure that this because we selected this surface we want to make sure that this is set to curvature so let's go and set that to curvature and hit ok so that is going to be our helper surface and that's going to be a big difference because that actually also takes into account the curvature of this arc going around the wing which the previous one didn't so this actually ends up with a slightly better result so now what we need to do is just hide our sketches and let's go ahead and perform the patch so let's click these three surfaces change them to curvature bring back our sketches actually we can now select this surface we don't have to use sketches so this surface this surface and this surface and then in the sketches i can only the only one that needs to close off the boundary is this wing right here and then go and hit ok because nothing else needs to be curvature behind the sketches you can see we now have that half of it now we don't actually need to provide the helper surface on the other one because we technically already have one and we have the best kind of helper surface because it's actually part of our model so i can now just delete that helper surface and do the patch on the other side so let's go create patch these three surfaces change them to curvature and then select these ones this one this one bring back our sketches and select that one right there and hit ok and that's all there really is to it so let's go ahead and delete these helper surfaces and patch up any remaining surfaces that we need so on the bottom side here you can see that i don't have this flat spot patched and we don't have this face of the angle patched so let's bring back our sketches and we can create a patch on these three surfaces like that and then we can create a patch let's hide our sketches for a second on this surface this surface this surface and that surface hit okay and now we've already got our headstock so now we just need to join it to the rest of the neck so let's hide our body wrong body hide my other components here like that select the whole thing and let's stitch it together hit ok and let's reapply our appearance and see what we got so now we have an asymmetrical with two different sized wings headstock and still have a dilute one thing we're going to want to check is we're going to want to go ahead and check our parametric so let's go ahead back to the where we created that angled plane and let's try changing the plane before we try to change the blue and let's change that from like a 10 degree like maybe i want a 13 degree it still works let's go back and change it to something way more extreme something nobody will probably ever use and let's do a 30 degree it looks kind of crazy but it still works so i'm pretty excited about that that part of it works flawless let's go back to 10 degree and let's go back to our headstock sketch and change the volute size so let's change this to 0.125 i might need to go a little bit bigger than that let's go 0.25 let's see if i can go a little smaller no it won't let me do that because of the way we ended up making this coincident and tangent to the nut line but that's still you'll get the point so hit finish and that still updates another thing we can also check sketch we can also check these volute arcs so let's try changing the radius of this and make it smaller so let's go like two inches and we still have a perfect transition let's go back and let's make it like six inches or let's go to five let's try six now it won't let me do that because at six inches this line will end up being a perfectly straight line and needs to remain an arc so i guess that is one limitation of this is there is a theoretical limit to how far that arc can come out before this turns straight so let's go ahead and finish the sketch actually we need to change that back to a larger dilute size so i'll go 0.625 that's about what i like to use and let's go ahead and take take a look at our zebra analysis and see if we still have some decent surfaces so click here if you remember from the previous video we had a little bit of a jumble here in the middle let's see if we can get this looking on straight it's still not quite perfect because we didn't end up lofting the entire thing and that's going to be really difficult to do but it's much much better than our previous one where it was kind of zigzagged right here so i don't know about you but i'm actually quite happy with that so let's go ahead and turn off our zebra analysis and let's go to the render workspace take a look at it with a little bit better lighting so we've got a nice smooth transition between these two and it looks like we've got a nice curvature smooth transition between these two faces here as well and we still maintained our parametrics and we were able to do a asymmetrical design so we didn't have to mirror anything over and we were able to do it in less steps without the use of intersection curve like i said before i actually still really love the intersection curve technique but understanding how that worked we were able to replicate the same results without having to go overly critical with our sketches in order to make that work we just simply extruded some surfaces up split those surfaces with our original sketches and effectively we did the same thing in less steps so i hope this helps you guys understand how i developed the sketches and i hope this method helps those of you who are struggling with modeling your designs to get a better result so before we end this video i would just like to say thank you to everybody who reached out to me to talk with me about troubleshooting ways of making this design more efficient and more reliable and user friendly i would not have been able to come up with it without your help so thank you again and for those of you who are not aware you can reach out to me on discord or via email if you are running into issues with any of the problems that we've described here in this video or any of my other videos i'm pretty active on discord and you'll probably get a pretty fast reply if you'd like to ask me a question so thank you guys so much this is austin i'm signing out

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 2,410

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

Id: N8VcumXW41Y

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/NaturalMaterials]

Excellent as always.

[u/vVPittVv]

Incredibly enlightening. I feel as if my third eye has opened.