Fillet/Rounded corners issue.

[TOwens777]

I am working on a guitar body.  It's a solid model with no t-splines.  I'm tryting to round the corners off (see attached.)

The Fillet function does not work stating the fillet cannot be created at the requested size (which happens to be any size.)

Is there another method I can use to round off these corners?

Thanks,

Tim

[TOwens777]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Well however you go about it, you're sure skilled designing awesome guitars!

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Thank you Jesse!  I really appreciate that!

[TOwens777]

Phil, any progress on my fillet issue?

[TrippyLighting]

Not sure whether there is a fillet issue or not but I don't think you are using the right tool for the job.

I recreated the guitar first as a subdivision surface model in Blender and then based on that created a t-spline body in Fusion 360. I've not posted it as I was out of town for several days and because I've been wanting to do a mini tutorial of how I generally approached modeling the t-Spline body.

I may post the model later today, but won't be able to do a turotial tonight.

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

So here's the part I've modeled. It's not finished and there's enough work yfor you left 🙂

Perhaps it can provide you with a guideline of how a T-Spline body for your guitar can look like.

[Anonymous]

That is awesome!  I can see the power of Blender for stuff like this.

Jesse

[TOwens777]

Wow!  That looks great! That's really really close to my handcarved design! Nice job!

I'm starting over with the body useing sculpt.  I've started and restarted a couple times but I think I might have a method that will work now.

If I get the entire body to work with sculpt can I use the split body function to cut it so that it I have a top and a back?

It has to be two pieces so that I can route out the wiring cavities in the center of the body.

[Phil.E]

Yes, you can split the body after you exit the Sculpt environment (parametric mode) or convert the body to solid (direct mode).

Sorry I haven't gotten back with you sooner. I'm trying several workflows to create the shape with Sculpt bodies, but so far nothing I can show you. Remember I'm not that good with Sculpt at the moment.

I did look at the original solid model you sent me, and I found why the fillet was failing. It was exactly as I expected, the sketch shapes used to cut the body profile are not tangent. This results in lot of vertical edges that break the path for the fillet. In this situation you can do two things: make the path tangent, or select multiple edges to create the fillet path.

I know you are moving to Sculpt, which I think is a great choice, but I wanted to close the loop (pun intended) on the fillet problems you had before. Please check out these images for general information about the fillet tool.

I'll show you whatever I come up with for Sculpt workflows when I can.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Found a great way in Sculpt to do this guitar I think, first creating Sculpt Faces such as shown in this great video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OphzbTt4rKo

I am somewhat following the guitar top mesh pattern that Trippy made in Blender, as visible when opening his attached .f3d file.  Then do a Sculpt extrude and select all the faces using a drag box selection, and choose Maintain Crease Edges.  With Edit Form can then move the edge nodes and what not down where the big slopes are desired, even being able to use Soft Modification option and change length count to 0 so only the selected edges of the guitar are affected.  Once done modeling that way, can go to Modify > Uncrease and choose the edges that should be uncreased/smoothed together, and viola!  

I didn't have time to do anything but a fairly small test right now but can make a screencast if anyone would like this.

Jesse

[TrippyLighting]

The guitar model I posted was entirely modeled in Fusion 360 😉

I did start with Blender simply beause I am more familiar with Blender's tools and because Blender is very fast for this kind of modeling. Once I had found a way how to approach this model I went ahead and started from scratch in Fusion 360. I find the Sculpt workflow in Fusion 360 very intuitive.

Generally I approached modelling similar to Curt Chan. Curt uses too many edge loops and polygons to approximate the shap. When you need to start eiting the T-Splain that can make it a bit painful.

[Anonymous]

That's totally awesome!  So basically, did you first manually create each face individually with methods like in that video, resulting in a 2D mesh, then extrude that, and finally use Edit Form for the highly tapered/curved areas?

[Phil.E]

Looks like it started as a quadball.

I'm going to throw in the towell on this one, having seen Trippy's model. It's better than I could do with a considerable bit more trying.

As a guitar player I find the challenge enticing... looks like it's time for an addition to my Philtone amp line. 🙂

[Anonymous]

Haha, don't throw in the towel!  This model is really a great way to learn sculpting, as I'm finding, and actually with the method I described and how I think Trippy did it, it's pretty fast actually.  I don't think a quadball was used, for one thing Trippy's model is open on the bottom.  Everything can be created from a quadball, almost 😉 

Philtone is going to be a household name, although it looks like there already is one 😕  http://www.philtone.com/contact.html

[Anonymous]

What about Philetone? 🙂

[TOwens777]

Trippy, what would you recomment for me to get started using sculpt mode?

I have tried a couple of times using the method in the posted youtube video.  That is creating the shape of the guitar using faces and then extruding the face. I had some issues but I can't recall what they were. One was something to do with manifold surfaces.  Bottom line is the form failed.  I tried again using an extruded rectangle.  I used the outline of the guitar under the box as a template.  This seemed to look smoother.

Which method (or other method) would you recomment starting with?

Thanks!!!

Tim

[TrippyLighting]

I am working on a video that I'll post maybe a little later today. The model definitely did not start out as a quad ball 😉

The shape of this guitar is defined by the outer edge and I started extruding a base shape. That will become more clear as I show the process.

[Anonymous]

I really look forward to that Trippy.  I tried with the face then extrude method I mentioned, and it worked pretty good, first roughly following the mesh faces you defined in 2D, then extruding and editing form, but ran into mesh crossing issues, which seem to be hit or miss to fix.

But now that I'm finally starting to see what Sculpting is all about for stuff like this, it really is pretty incredible and powerful stuff.

Jesse

[TrippyLighting]

No talk just video with some text. Of course most of it is time lapse - I am experimenting with Screenflow - I am not that fast. Actually I am rather slow as I have not modeled anything like that in a while 😉

[Anonymous]

That is very enlightening, the techniques and workflow you used.  For one thing I had no idea you could make a curved profile like that to then manually "sweep" around.  I'm going to study this closer.  Thanks man!

[Anonymous]

Was just thinking, because of the importance of getting the curved faces you were making around the perimeter of the guitar to line up with their respective apposing faces on the other side of the guitar and guitar "horns", if I were to fully do something like this, I would probably print out the guitar image (unless had a digitizing tablet I guess), and hand pencil sketch "dissection" lines across the guitar, based on the guitar geometry, how much curvature there is in areas, if/where I want star points (i.e. more than 4 converging edges), etc., to get a high level layout, then scan that back into the computer and insert as a reference image.  I think it could save some time and give a super orderly looking mesh, even if there are additional face divisions that don't exactly follow the original hand sketch layout.

Well I got to get back to work, this sculpting stuff is just too interesting.

Jesse

[Anonymous]

Actually I'm going to try, and then make a guide, for what I think would be a pretty fast approach, where the guitar outline is just extruded as a solid body, then split by two types of surfaces.  One surface would be created in Sculpt for the big irregularly sloping areas.  The other surface, if regular fillet does not give sufficient radius, would likely just be an arc swept in the Patch environment to make any sized fillet on the top and bottom edge of the guitar.  A likely unneeded option is that instead of an arc, would sweep profile of edge of sculpt geometry to insure perfect continuity. 

Will see how it goes soon.

Jesse