How to model an Oneida Kestrel?

[Anonymous]

Howdy folks,

I am having trouble modelling an Oneida Kestrel bow - its a beautifully designed piece of engineering, and I'd eventually like to 3D print it out for hanging on the wall or perhaps cosplay events. I am very new to the Fusion 360 workflow, so I'm not entirely sure what would be the ideal or at least least painful method to use.

I can model the bow alright when it comes to the more regular shapes like the inner and outer limbs, or the cams. What I am having trouble with are the parts circled in red, where the riser makes a transition.

I have tried:

1. Extruding from sketches - this will create accurate shapes in either the X or Y dimension, however it is very tricky to get the vertices lined up or matching to translate the curves in the other dimension. Abandoned this idea.

2. Creating a box, and doing a split body on it with the front and side profile sketches - creates the full bow accurately but has pretty ugly

geometry. Makes it very difficult to do deeper chamfering on some of the lines. Abandoned this idea.

3. Creating a box/plane in sculpt mode and alt-extruding to get the shape - seems alright, but tricky to get the creases and shape right. 

I am thinking of trying lofts next, with the side profiles being lofted along the front view as a rail, drawing a profile at each vertex on the rail.

What do you think would be the most effective method to model the bow?

Thank you 🙂

[davebYYPCU]

Loft will do those two sections, 

bear in mind that you can swap between environments, to get sections done in each that suits, (sculpting has its own methods but still can do it.)

Might help....

[SaeedHamza]

Hi,

I agree with @davebYYPCU about the loft tool, it's the best thing that comes to mind

If you could attach some views of the bow ( like an elevation view ), I can show you how it's done

Regards

[TrippyLighting]

In a way I'd have to disagree with the two prior posters.

While I do agree that the loft tool is a good tool to create this Shape this would by no means be a simple 2 pert loft. It would be a rather larger number of lofts entirely in the patch workspace.

The sculpt workspace should also work well to recreate this piece but modeling in the sculpt workspace works very differently. As you a new of the world of 3D modeling and CAD this might actually work to your advantage.

Here's a link to a better side view for those that are so inclined to try their luck.

[Anonymous]

Thank you all for replying, I will give the lofts a go. Thank you for the very kind offer@SaeedHamza, if you don't mind I'll try and get it done on my own for now - no better way to learning than doing!

@TrippyLighting, you're right, I would definitely be doing this with a multi profile loft to arrive at better geometry. I am new to Fusion 360 but have played around with 3DS Max, Rhino and Blender on an on-off basis so I am trying to get to grips with Fusion's methods of elegant modelling. At this moment it just seem more intuitive to box model, subdivide, and edge loop the whole thing 

[SaeedHamza]

I respect that, and we're here always if you needed anything
Best of luck

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

If you have experience in polygon/sub-d modeling, then you can also simply continue to model that in your favorite polygon modeling app. Mine is Blender.

You can then export the quad-mesh from that software as a .obj file into Fusion 360 and convert it into a T-Spline to end up with a perfectly fine surface, or solid model (If the quad mesh is closed).

ON thing to keep in mind is that urgently T-Splines in Fusion 360 do not support edge weights, so in order to define an edge more crisply yoo'll have to use additional edge loops.

Unfortunately equidistant edge loops also aren't supported so there is a bit more work involved if you do tin the T-SPLine environment. Hence I use Blender for the bulk of the work and only make small adjustments in Fusion 360.

That way you get the best of both worlds!

[Anonymous]

Ah ok will proceed along those lines then 🙂 Thank you all who gave their insights!