Sculpt form on a curved face

[nicolas.leduc.mail]

Good Morning,

I'm proceeding with the design of a model ship with Fusion 360. I create parts then manufacture them with a decent CNC router.

Most of what I did so far is being handled just fine.

However, there is a part that seems to be more tricky.

On the poop wall of the ship, a deer is sculpted on a curved surface (highlighted in blue). 

I obtain the correct shape of the surface with a projection on a cylinder. 

However, what can I do to roughly model this sculpture (bas-relief) on that curved surface?

I cannot convert the surface to a form to play with T-splines. 

I could create a YZ form plane close to the surface and model the deer with T-splines, then replace the surface with the one I just shaped. Yet, it wouldn't be curved appropriately around the Z axis. 

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be more appropriate to use a 3D modeling software such as blender for this task. But I suppose dealing with mesh surfaces

Thanks a lot for your advice in this matter !

Best regards,

Nicolas

[hamid.sh.]

Maybe my reply to this post helps.

[nicolas.leduc.mail]

This is very interesting and could solve the geometric issue. Nice workaround.

However, I'm still undecided as to wether I should draw this deer within the sculpt environment or use blender.

[TrippyLighting]

How familiar are you with Blender or with T-Spline modeling?

[nicolas.leduc.mail]

Absolute beginner!
The task seems a bit too ambitious.
I managed to use the 'pull' tool so that the tspline sticks to the curved
surface but sculpting is difficult.
I may remove that deer completely and stick to the frieze, whose geometry
seems simple enough for paramatric design and projection.

[TrippyLighting]

If you can share a larger picture of the deer and perhaps also the model (export as .f3d and attach to next post), maybe I can help out.

[nicolas.leduc.mail]

Thank you for your help !

You will find attached the f3d file. I deleted my feeble attempts for sculpting as well as the contour frieze, which I will emboss later. 

The larger deer image is included as a canvas.

The curved surface I would like to be embossed is designed using cylinders and an extruded sketch with an intersection of the obtained bodies. 

I'm not sure sculting this deer is feasible. 

I also tried to vectorize the image to work with the resulting splines but it is too complex and lacks symmetry. 

In my most recent attempt, I created a plane with T-splines at the offset location of plane 2, then I projected it on the curved surface with the 'pool tool'. It worked rather well. However:

- sculpting the shape of the deer in itself is difficult

- I have no certainty about actually being able to create a solid body from the shape and combine it properly.

I admit that being able to perform this kind of work with fusion would be great news, since I intend to mill most parts...

My best regards,

Nicolas

[TrippyLighting]

Sculpting the deer is going to be some work, but it is not too difficult.

I can create a screencast later in the week to show you how to get started.

Modeling the boat without any embellishments is going to be a challenge as well, so I'd focus on that first!

[nicolas.leduc.mail]

I will focus on that indeed ! So far, the pace is slow but steady.

I would be VERY interested in a screencast about sculpting this deer.

I will dive into scupting this week, but at first sight,  for 'artistic' purposes or 'embellishment' sculpting, resources are scarce.

If Fusion can be used reasonnably easily for such purposes, things will get very exciting for us here. 

Best regards,

Nicolas

[nicolas.leduc.mail · Accepted solution]

Hi,
I managed to adapt a method using a mesh:
1. Draw with Fusion a sketch with the main features of this shallow sculpture.
2. Extrude those features with an approximate height
3. Export as stl and open with Zbrush or blender
4. Add/Remove height and deal with finer details with the clay tools. Even without a proper knowledge of those pieces of sofware, this is feasible.
5. Remove/Add polygons
6. Export the new STL file
7. Import the mesh in Fusion, repair the surface and combine with the elements designed within the parametric model.

The body obtained has a lot of faces and this is some heavy duty task for my laptop to deal with the operations such as combining/moving it.

Limit: The sculpure is extruded from a sketch designed in a plane. Therefore, the base of the 'bas-relief' is flat. As such, the sculture fused with the curved poop of the ship remains rather flat.

This solution is less elegant than a proper sculpture with T-splines. A found a few videos describing the latter. I remain very interested in what you could do.

Best regards,

Nicolas