How to turn on names of body components? Also, how to link surfaces?

[Anonymous]

Hey there. I'm new to Fusion 360 and I'm trying to design a body for a bass guitar I'm going to cut out. I'm running into an issue, though. I just figured out how to de-stitch the P-Bass model I found on on grabcad, but the thing is, it split it into some 200+ separate "bodies." Is there some sort of "labels" option that shows something like "Body1" or "Body211" when I hover over it with the mouse? I've tried googling this, and I'm still coming up short on this.

As for my other question, the P-Bass model had a cutout for the pickups modeled into it, and I extruded that upwards to where it's level with the body surface. Only thing now is that it's not a solid surface with no cut lines. It just looks like it's two parallel surfaces. Is there a way I can select the "cut out" and the body surface and make them into a single surface? I'm just wanting to totally get rid of where the old pickup route was so I have a single surface to work from.

I've attached my file, as reference.

[mango.freund]

[Anonymous]

How do I get that toolbar? I can't seem to find that. Also, I may have found a solution. I stitched the body together by "Front" "back" and "side" and it seemed to have made it into one piece.

New question, though. There's a number of screw holes in the design that can't be stitched together because they're not touching each other. How do I group them together in a single "body" which I can turn on and off via the "Bodies" panel with the visibility button?

[g-andresen]

Hi,

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@Anonymous  schrieb:
How do I get that toolbar? I can't seem to find that.

this way

günther

[mango.freund]

[Anonymous]

Thank you. I got that part cleared up.

[Anonymous]

Which part is this solving?

[TrippyLighting]

Before I go into details, let me advise you that one of the worst things you can do as a new Fusion 360 user is to download stuff and then try to modify it. I completely understand the drive to do that but I would recommend resisting that temptation.

You are only going to prolong your learning experience and will be more frustrated,

OK. Now that we've got that out of the way ...

1. There is no need to unstitch the model. There is a much easier way to accomplish what you want to do, but in order to do so, I need the original, stitched model as downloaded from GrabCAD. I see 2 models there when searching for P-Bass, but don't know which one you downloaded.

2. Even when unstitching, if you un-check "chain selection" in the Unstitch dialogue, you can unstitch selected faces from the body and don't end up with hundreds of surface bodies

3. Imported models by default have the timeline turned off and for good reasons. In this case, I would turn it on immediately after importing the file.

[Anonymous]

Yea? I guess I was trying to kind of get my feet wet by modifying an existing model, and then using the function which allows you to trace an image outline in order to build a model from scratch (I can't remember the name of it, I just saw it in a video in passing). Would it be better to go that route right from the start?

As far as the model I started with, I attached it.

[TrippyLighting]

Let's hope you can make sense of my waffling 😉

[Anonymous]

Ahhhh, that's a great video and a great accident! Haha. Thank you! As far as the holes, I wasn't necessarily wanting to delete all of them, I just wanted to group them together in a single "body" or some other way to group them together which would allow me to make them visible or invisible with a single click on the "eye" button in the sidebar.

Also, what's your thoughts on a better way to learn to do this instead of using an existing model and modifying it from there?

Also, is there any way to turn the names of the body components on that would show when you hover your cursor over the parts? Or does Fusion 360 not allow that?

[TrippyLighting]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Also, what's your thoughts on a better way to learn to do this instead of using an existing model and modifying it from there?

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The first thing you should learn is proper sketching techniques. There are a number of good tutorials on YouTube.

Understand how to constrain and dimension a sketch.

There are good tutorial courses in the self-paced learning section and I'd probably start with one of those.

As you can see, you can get to those web pages directly from within Fusion 360.

 

[Anonymous]

I've been doing these courses over the past few days and it's gotten me familiar with a good bit of the fundamentals. But I'm curious, how far would you recommend getting into these lessons? Should I do them all when I just want to design and make solid body instruments? Or are only just getting to know a few of them good enough? I just started "Solid modeling basics" this morning, and I'm wondering if that will be good enough to get something like a P-Bass sketched out and a model completed, or is there a "stopping point" you'd recommend with these?

[TrippyLighting]

Well, start sketching out a P-Bass and then share the model so we can see where you are skill-wise 😉

[Anonymous]

Shortly after I made the post, I started getting antsy and discovered how to use the "canvas" feature. I've attached my work so far. 

What I'm having issues with rn is how to "constrain" the couple hundred points from when I used the spline feature to trace the body, pickguard, and pickup outline. I'm not sure how to turn all those into a single line which I can then constrain. I'm waiting on some radius gauges and a square to arrive in the mail so I can measure the angles of the pickups I'm using along with the neck pocket measurements, as well. Any advice so far on the above?

After I get the body finished, I'm going to move on to modeling the neck, as well. But that will be the next step after I fully model the body.

[TrippyLighting]

Nope, no and no!

I am not sure what courses you've been taking but ...

1. The first thing you might already have done is to find a reference dimension you can use to calibrate the canvas. Then calibrate the canvas. 
2. Find a reference edge/point on the canvas image to align with the origin. For example the point the arrow indicates would be good to line up with the sketch/design origin.  While it cannot be seen in the canvas image, I am assuming this is a physical edge on the guitar that you can use to reference measurements from.
3. Your splines have too many spline control points, by a factor of 10!!!
   Here is one half of the outline as I would approach it. It takes some patience to manipulate the tangent handles , but it pays off big dividends:
   

[Anonymous]

I completed these courses and these courses so far. I just started at the top on this page and am slowly working my way down in the courses that seem applicable to me. 

As far as the reference dimension, yep I found that was the thing to do after doing a bit of googling on how to use the canvas function for guitars. I centered it on the bridge and rotated slightly till it was center on the neck, and then I calibrated it to the true width of that bridge. I just went down to the local guitar center and took some measurements from one of those they had in stock. That line you drew the red arrow to is just the end of the neck heel, though. I just put it in there cause it eventually has to be modeled anyway. But whoooooboi, I'm just gonna start again with all the spline control points. Lol. I just got too click happy. After that, I gotta figure out how to constrain them. Would that be done by adding dimensions to the entire body? Or is there a different way I'm not thinking of, at the moment? I think the constraints in the tutorials were done mostly by measurements. 

[TrippyLighting]

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@Anonymous wrote:

... I'm just gonna start again with all the spline control points. Lol. I just got too click happy. After that, I gotta figure out how to constrain them. Would that be done by adding dimensions to the entire body? Or is there a different way I'm not thinking of, at the moment?

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This pertains to fit point splines only!

Because these splines still have quite a number of points, once completely done and happy with the sketches spline outline I would use the fix constraint to lock them down and prevent accidental movement of spline points when not actively editing the sketch. If you start applying all the dimensions needed to lock down a fit-point spline with 9 points your sketch will become completely clustered with dimensions. 

Others might have differing opinions 😉

[Anonymous]

That was a pretty good learning experience! I've attached the updated version; does it look a bit better to you? I still had to use around twice as many points than it looks like you needed for me to get the angles right, but I learned what those tangent handles do now. I had no idea before.