Guitar Body Help

[TOwens777]

Just when you think you've solved one problem another one rears it's ugly head.  Kind of like playing whack a mole. I said in my fillet problem thread that I would continue to use that thread to keep all the info in one place but it seems no one is looking at it since I marked it solved.  So, here's a new one...

I've got another issue I need some help with.  Let me explain...

I first designed my guitar body as a solid model.. This worked great for the routes and channels and so forth. However, it was less than adequate when I got to the more organic flows of the rounded edges and cut aways. So, I followed the adivce of the popular consensus and remodeled those portions in sculpt. 

The body must be CNC'd as two pieces.  A top and a back.  Both sides of the two pieces must be routed and then the final product glued together.

As I explained in my previous thread I REALLY do not want to go back and redo all the hardware routes and such in a new sculpt body.  I have countless hours getting all the precise measurements right. So, my solution is to combine the bodies. I want to use the center portion of the solid body with all the hardware routes and replace the outside contoured section with the sculpted body.

The problem is... the sculpted body has a hollow center.  When I cut out and replace the outer portion the inside hollow areas show up.  Somehow these hollow portions must be filled in to form a solid surface.

Attached are pics of the issue. 

The 1st pic that is both bodies visible.  The solid body must be cut away to show the contours.

The 2nd pic shows both bodies visible after I cut away the outer portion.

The 3rd pic shows the problem.  The reverse of the top has hollow spots. 

Any ideas on how to accomplish this?

THANKS!!!!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hey again!  It's so cool to see this guitar you're going to make and the progress you've made.  Regarding the solid body issue, have you tried the Create > Boundary fill tool that is in both the Model and Patch environments?  That should create a solid body within your surface.  I'm not in front of Fusion right now, but basically you need to choose surfaces such that they form a completely enclosed volume, and there's another field of the Boundary fill tool where you then select a check mark box in the volume you want to fill.  You may possibly need to stitch multiple surfaces together in the Patch environment under Modify > Stitch and choose a tolerance value that works.  Once the solid body is made, you can turn off visibility of the surface body(s).

Once you have the solid body, you can proceed to use your method of inserting a portion of the previous guitar model, which is an ingenious idea.  Another approach would be to somehow create a positive of the hardware route cavities, so that this tool could then be used to do a subtractive Combine operation with your new guitar body.  Methods to make this positive would be Boundary fill again, adding a few additional Patch surfaces to make a fully enclosed volume, or you could create a slab placed in the region and then do a subtractive combine with the original guitar body.  

Very awesome stuff.

Jesse

[Phil.E]

(I had placed this response in the previous thread, it should apply here - PE)

"

Here is where you get to become your own teacher. Split body is a simple operation. Try it and tell me if you can use construction planes.

If you have trouble, let us know, of course!!

For your second idea, it's a bit more complicated. Here is a video of me capping an internal volume, just happens to be another musical instrument, and then using the body made by the void to cut that same void out of other bodies.

https://screencast.autodesk.com/Main/Details/cfac5a77-c1b2-4fa6-ab85-17c0b1cd9186"

[TrippyLighting]

The subtractive tool approach that Jesse suggested it what I'd do. In fact this is a way one can build a litte standard feature library pretty quickly.

Build the cut-out features as a separate positive models in their own fle for multiple re-use and then "subtract" them from you curnt model.

I've worked with the library features in Solid Works before and had been thinkig about how that could be realised in Fusion 360. This subtractive way of building features could be quite a powerful technique also for people that build machines where many featueres are often repeated.

[TOwens777]

Thank you gentlemen!!  Phil, I got the sculpt body to split with no problem.  Thanks for the tip! 🙂  Guys,  I'm lost on the second part.  I've tried the boundary fill. It seems it only works with solid objects.  The parameters are "select tools", "select cells", and "operation."  It will let me select both bodies as tools but wont' let me select either for cells.  Am I missing something? Is there a way to convert the sculpted body to a solid object?  I tried the stich command too.  It lets me select both the solid body and the sculpt body and lets me apply but the result is nothing.  No effect.  Phil, the screencast you posted only contains solids so I'm not sure how to incorporate this method using a sculpted object. 

As far as the subtractive method, I'm not sure how this would worki with a sculpted object.  How do you make a sculpted object solid?  Sculpt just seems to create surfaces.  If I do a body it it's hollow.

[Oceanconcepts]

I apologize if I’m not following this completely, but I think I would do as Jesse suggests just create a shape- a block or a set of primitives- such that it encompassed all the areas that you want to preserve as cutouts- no need to be precise so long as you completely fill in the areas that will eventually be removed. 

Then cut the original body from that shape, leaving behind a positive version of the areas you will want removed. Fusion’s boolean tools are incredible effective. 

You need to make the sculpt form into a solid. Turning the sculpt shape into a solid varies if you are in history or direct modeling. The shape needs to be closed- it looks like yours is- you want to Convert (in direct modeling) or Finish Form (in history) before you split the body, so you get a solid- then split. If the shape is not closed you will get surfaces, so you need to fix that issue first. 

Once you have a solid and the positive version of the pathways you need to subtract from it, you should be there. I do this basic process a lot when I create a solid that shows where I need to place electronic components, then build a body around that.

[TOwens777]

Ok, I think I'm following you now.  The sculpt body must be closed on all sides before finishing and exiting to the modeling environment in order for it to be solid.

That seems to be my problem.  I'll give that a shot and report back.

THANKS!!!!

[Phil.E · Accepted solution]

Just FYI here is a video of me making Boolean tools out of the voids in your guitar model. The resulting body could be inserted into a future guitar model and subtracted.

Obviously it would be better to break this into multiple shapes. One for the pickups, one for the pots, etc.

And finally, thanks again, you'll see the Boundary Fill operation partially fails for some reason so looks like I caught another bug thanks to your original guitar model.

[TOwens777]

Phil, I'm not quite at the point making the boolen tools yet.  That looks perfect for what I'm trying to accomplish.  I will probably have questions when I get to that part.   Right now I'm trying to complete the redesigned body in sculpt.  I have the outlines of my cut-aways defined but I'm loosing them when i try to fill in the flat parts of the top and back with faces.  Any idea how to approach this without loosing detail of the curves?

[Anonymous]

To create the flat areas using the Patch tool in Patch environment, you first need to choose Finish Form in the upper right, which will convert the Tspline surface to a regular patch surface.  The grid pattern on the surface and Edit Form ability will disappear after this conversion, but the surface should otherwise be preserved.  Then when using the Patch tool and selecting the perimeter to patch, be sure to choose Smooth or Tangent for the Continuity option.  If the curvature for the guitar top is too great for either of these options (i.e. not flat enough) you can go back to edit the form in Sculpt environment again (via finding it in timeline and choosing edit), and adjust the Tspline/mesh to be flatter near the edge you want to patch, possibly even adding faces in a quick fashion in the Edit Form tool. 

Hope that helps.

Jesse

[TOwens777]

Thanks Jesse!  I've successfully finished sculpting my new body.  I used the patch feature to fill in the flat spaces on the top and back.

Next question... How do I add a material/appearence to the patch area?  It's a brown color and I can't change it to blend in with the rest of the body.

[Anonymous]

Great to hear!  It sounds like what you need to do is in Patch environment go do Modify > Reverse Normal and select the patch faces you made.  However the appearance is more or less inconsequential, especially considering you probably next want to do a Boundary Fill operation to create a solid body. 

Jesse

[TOwens777]

Jesse,  I'm struggling with how the different modeling environments interact with each other.  I thought once I finished a sculpt and selected "Finish Form" it would convert into a solid body.  That doesn't seem to be the case.  If I try to do a combine with another solid body the sculpt body is not selectable.  Also,  do I need to create a Boundary Fill on the patches or does that appy to the t-spline body?  Or both?  So, I guess what I'm asking is.  How do I convert a the patchs and t-spline body to a solid objects?

[Oceanconcepts]

Quick jump in here, apologize for being short-

“finish form” should give you a solid IF the sculpt body is completely closed. Otherwise you get surfaces.

If you have surfaces, the “Patch” tool in the patch workspace applied to closed loops can close the holes and then you can use “Stitch” on the entiure collection of surfaces to create a solid body. Boundary Fill works on surfaces, correct.

You can convert to a solid body only after you have a watertight form. 

Combine tools are only going to work with solid bodies. You need to get to those first.

[TOwens777]

Thanks to everyone's help I have a completed body.   Here's how I accomplished it. Once I got my new body to a solid I simply sketched an outline around my routes in the center of the body.  I cut everything else outside that.  Then I did the opposite with the new smooth body.  I cut out the inside to accomodate the cutout routed body.  Then I combined the two bodies into one.  I did this for both the top and the back. 

I tried to use Phil's approach to making boolean tools but had issues with that.  The final "tool" was only half the void space.  For some reason it wouldn't do the whole thing.

I think you were having the same problem Phil?

I attached a few pics.  At some point I plan on modeling the rest of the hardware to show a completed guitar.  Right now my main focus is getting the body and neck ready to CNC.

The rest is just a visual to help me with designs.

I think I'm ready to move on to the CAM portion but I have couple of questions first...

1.) After I combined bodies as I described above I can still see a faint while line where the two bodies were combined together.  Any way to fill that?  Will this be a problem when I CNC?

2.) I used mostly quited maple for my guitars.  I stain the maple with a transparent stain so that the beautiful chatoyant grain patterns are visible.  How can customize my own material so as to add figured maple?  I can find plent of photos online in jpg, etc.  Is it then possible to add a transparent color on top of that?

Thanks so much for your help!!!

-Tim

[TOwens777]

More pics...

[TOwens777]

Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Bueller?  Anyone?

[Anonymous]

Hi Tim, it's often pretty hard to diagnose problems someone is having just based on descriptions, or even pictures often aren't really enough.  What really is the way to go, and is wonderfully possible with the computers and software that now exists, is to let another person actually experience the problem first hand to figure out a solution to it!  Hence I would suggest if you're unable to share the guitar model that is giving some problems, is to make a very simplified model, just enough to exhibit a problem that you can then export the .f3d file to share.  I would suggest this for the Boundary Fill issue for trying to make tools, and this gap that you mentioned after combine.  As for adding custom patterns, I don't know anything about that, from what it looks like there aren't options to do that. 

Kudos for making a tremendous amount of awesome progress!

Jesse

[TrippyLighting]

1. The faint line does not necessarily indicate a problem, but as Jesse has already posted, this is hard to judge without having access to the actual model. You can share models made in Fusion throughthe data panel In Fusion 360 with other Fusion users. You just need their email address.

2. Wood is an incredibly complex material. Anisotropy, sub surface scattering etc. The existing wood textures that Fusion offers are really not too shabby at all, however, if youare looking to make something photorealistic for a closeup such as this chair you may need an external  rendering software with a more complex material system. Thea Renderer comes to mind as it has  Fusion exporter. The chair was not modeled in Fusion 360 - even though that is entirely possible with Fusion 360! - but with Blender and then rendered with Indigo Renderer.

That may be a little to advanced for your needs now, so in order to render with a wood texture of your choice in Fusion 360 , depending on how realistic you want this to look like, simple photos down;loaded from the Internet may not suffice.

the Fusion 360 material system IIRC has also several differnt channels for a texture.

1. A diffuse (albedo) channel for the for the color
2. A bump map or perhaps even no map channle for the 3D grain structure
3. A specularity channel. this may not be so interesting for a wood that his coated say with layers and layers of laquer or polyurethane.

You'd need matching textures for each of these channels. Good textures cost money, but in my experience are well worth it. The walnut textures for the chair rendering are from Arroway.de. I have not found a quilted maple texture in their collection. It may take a while to find a really good quilted maple texture but don't just look for photos on the internet.