Getting Zebra stripes smooth | Class A surfacing questions

[Anonymous]

Peace everyone. 

Post beneath is the transition I am trying to make happen. For some reason I can't seem to get a smooth transition going here. The image describes pretty well what I am trying to achieve however my zebra stripes look kinda funny and that triangle has been racking my brain for the past couple days. 

Any and all help is welcome. 

Peace | Much Love,

Bobby 

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

Fusion is not like Alias made for Class A surfacing - fortunately something you also really don't want to get much into 😉

From the image it is hard to see how you build this.

Currently Loft does not provide G1 G2 along boundary rails and thus limits you with makeing square faces.

What however can work building the round elliptical body alone and then the circular extrusion and create the secondary blend surface

between them either via a fillet command or cut the space into it and use loft there.

[SEIZMICdesign]

I've had a couple tangles with surfacing in F360 too. Not this program's strongest capability.

[Anonymous]

I would try to add a few more surfaces to relax everything.  It looks like your doing too much at the point of the four sided hole. You can always convert it into a tspline then crease the outer edges to make evrything right and tight. Then convert it back to a brap. You could then match that new surface with the old maybe through a large patch followed by a loft or something. I would of made the whole thing through tplines, so much easier.. Hope this helps. 

[Anonymous]

As always everyone's help is appreciated and I am continuing to work through this problem. 

@SEIZMICdesign

Ah building entirely through t-splines. V1 of this design was done using that method. T-Splines is an incredible plug in, truly. I makes finding these forms and realizing them sooo much easier then the struggles of surfacing. Don't get me started on surfacing in SW. T-Splines for me, however, is only an iterative step and once the form is found it needs to be "refined".

With regards to making a particular SURFACE in T-Spline and then reattaching it, I really resonate with that Idea, my concern is keep the edges of the surface aligned to their corresponding edges.

@cekuhnen

With regards to not being able to assign G1 G2 via rails in the loft command I've overcome this by using the patch tool set to curvature to overcome some of these shortcomings. The unfortunate part is need separate edges causing lots of cut surfaces. Gets messy.

Whats the deal with people not liking Alias? Seems like what all the serious surfacing work gets done in. I will confidently say that surfacing in Fusion has been a much smoother operation than SW.

Appreciate the responses everyone. I'm gonna keep messing with it. I'll crack the code, when I do, I'll post.

Peace | Much Love,

Bobby  

[PhilProcarioJr]

@Anonymous

"With regards to making a particular SURFACE in T-Spline and then reattaching it, I really resonate with that Idea, my concern is keep the edges of the surface aligned to their corresponding edges."

That's what the "Match tool" is for.

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

T-Splines is an incredible tool but if you want design changes like with your body I am not sure if it is the best option.

T-Splines also has the technological problem that while in most cases it is sufficiently smooth to the human eye around

star points and such the CV density gets currently dense and thus you can see that in the zebra but even more in the

curvature comb.

But if one would see this later to what degree in manufacturing is always a different question.

I would try to model everything cleanly with BREP and not mix BREP and T-Splines too much following the idea to

create BREPS via T-Splines to use as a BREP modeling tool replacement. T-Splines will create its own patch layout

and the more density you have in general the higher the probability something might can go wrong.

The patch tool is pretty fantastic and is best used to fill an area left over. But because it is a draped and then trimmed

surface I would not build further surfaces from the trimmed surface.

Regarding Alias it is not that hard of a software to use, the problem is that good Class A surfacing is incredible hard

and time consuming. Here at GM the car designers mainly draw or make some Alias concepts. But a dedicated

Alias sculptor makes the refined Alias models.

In addition it is also limited in it's ability. Alias is a pure surface modeler. It has no read usable 3D solid tools.

Also the design history it has sometimes you have to break to further align surface patches which makes it more

a static modeler then.

At Apple they make the outside design in Alias and then in Siemens NX they create all the internal surfaces to create

the 3D volumes for production.

That's why I switched to Fusion for work and teaching because it is quite easy to learn, offers good modeling tools

and if a surface design is too hard in Fusion we can still build it in Alias bring it over and then add all the needed missing parts.

[Anonymous]

@cekuhnen 

With regards to creating a surafce outside Fusion and bringing it in for solid modelling, its beginning to sound like that may be the best approach. Granted there is an entire professor to operating a Class A modelling program properly I hope that I may be able to do something of this complexity without too many hiccups. 

@PhilProcarioJr

I'm going to give this a shot. Thanks a ton! 

Peace | Much Love,

Bobby 

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous Just keep in mind Class A surfaces based on the complexity of the model can be a very challenging topic.

I consider cars the hardest parts to do because there you have to work with the limits of what Class A forces you to do!