Guidance & Suggestions With Next Steps: Transforming Extruded Sketch Into Organic Sand Bed (Form vs Mesh vs Other?)

[Rebel_Nerf_Herder]

Hello there,

First post! 🤗 🎉

Soooo, I’m attempting to design (To 3D print) a tile placement tray for a board game I have. So far, I’ve created and extruded the base sketch and tile inset areas (see attached images).

My goal now is to make the tray look more like an ocean sand bed rather than flat and geometric.

Specifically, I’d like to:

• Slope the outer edges down toward the print plane like a sand dune
• Add a sloped finger access area on one edge of each tile inset
• Create gentle bumps and uneven terrain on the surface
• Add small rock formations for colorful decorative tiny coral elements
  
  

I’m unsure what the best next step is.

Should I:

• Convert this to a Form (T-Spline) and sculpt it
• Convert to Mesh
• Or use another workflow?

I want to keep the tile insets dimensionally accurate while making the rest more organic.

I’m still fairly new to Fusion 360 and really appreciate any support or guidance you might be able to provide!

Stephen

[TrippyLighting]

Any of that can be done with any of the modeling tools, but ...

If it were me, I would create the "base" board, the dunes the sloped outer edges, and the small rock formations as T-Spline (Form) models. I'd model this from scratch and NOT try to convert a solid model to T-Splines.

Then the recesses for the recesses for tiles, and then "sloped finger access areas" I would use solid modeling for and combine the two.

The more difficult things to model might be the "small rock formations for colorful decorative tiny coral elements".

That also sounds like T-Spline or Sub-D models to me, but more on the challenging side than the other stuff. 

If you can post the model you have so far, I can demonstrate some of this in a video.

[Rebel_Nerf_Herder]

Thank you so much for touching base!

I would really appreciate seeing your approach in a video. That would be extremely valuable for helping me understand the process and best practices.

I've attached the model as a .f3d file. Please let me know if this works or if I should post it as a link.

Thank you again for taking the time to help and offering to demonstrate! I’m excited to learn from your workflow.