Just Need Help on Pickguard Design

[evanDXG2P]

I love this guitar I'm designing but I am just not feeling the pickguard design and am frankly tired and a little bit stuck. The guitar has a kind of vintage feel about it and I want the pickguard shape to have that kind of 60s car flair that I feel the lines on the guitar do. Just wondering if anyone has any suggestions or would want to collaborate. 

[TrippyLighting]

I am not much of a car guy, but I am a 60's vintage 😉

I am going to solicit some participation/opinions:

@etfrench @jeff_strater @keqingsong @jhackney1972 @g-andresen @wersy @Phil.E @davebYYPCU @aliobidi @wmhazzard @GRSnyder @TheCADWhisperer @hamid.sh.

[Phil.E]

My take isn't much different than what is shown here.

Try to make the shape be independent of the surroundings. Let the hardware float above it as if they don't touch. Let the arcs continue as if uninterrupted. Don't make the pick guard follow the body, where possible. The pick guard is jewelry and the body is the work horse. This method creates layers that draw you in, give texture.

Might need to move some of the screw holes to accommodate a new shape.

[Phil.E]

Looks good dolled up with some fillets and glossy paint.

[GRSnyder]

Interesting project! It's looking really nice.

I don't know diddly-squat about guitar construction either, but my subjective first impression is that there may be a bit too much visual weight in the green-circled region below:

I don't know that the right side really needs to follow the body edge so closely, either. The contour up to the red-circled area feels right to me, but after that I think you could stray a bit more away from the edge in order to trim off some additional bulk.

I like @Phil.E's urge to uncover the central cavity too. That adds a more structured rhythm and removes weight. All together, something like this:

This is just for illustration of the schema - clearly, these aren't the aesthetically optimal curves. And I cheated! By moving the knob holes and filling in some of the underlying cavity. I don't know if this layout is even mechanically plausible for a guitar.

[evanDXG2P]

Wow. This rules. I will probably have to adjust the spacing near the bridge just a little bit due to the shape of the hipshot bridge but this looks fantastic. Thank you!

[evanDXG2P]

Honest question - how do you get the graphical settings to be so much more realistic than my renders?

[Phil.E]

Happy to explain.

It's called "rendering" and what it does is calculate realistic images based on visual properties in the appearance materials, and a "lighting environment", using what is called "ray tracing" to compute the path of light rays.

Sounds complicated, and while the workflow is easy, yes it's complicated to calculate such images. So there is a special workspace called Render. 

Here is a 1 minute, silent movie version of how to render quick images. This is the technique I used to make my images above. 

Here is the official product help page for render, with a 5 minute narration of basically the same exact thing in the product documentation. There is a lot of explanation and detail in this video. Note: the video is older, and Fusion looks a little different here, but the workspaces and commands work exactly the same.

While you are viewing the Help documentation, take a look around. Let me know if anything could use a better explanation. We are happy to add content in the Help section.

In the future, try out the help section by searching for terms using the help menu in Fusion 360. If you can't find it in help, let us know on these forum pages. The community is always glad to help someone with a question like this! 🙂

[evanDXG2P]

Thank you so much. That was super helpful