Guitar neck surfacing

 From:  Michael Gibson
4713.2 In reply to 4713.1 
Hi Don - 5 sided areas are pretty awkward to surface - surfacing typically wants to have 4-sided boundaries.

For something like this you may want to extend one side in order to make a larger 4-sided piece to surface and then trim off the excess.

This would go something like this - decide which direction you want to be "dominant", and then make the small curve be a longer extended curve in that direction, something like this:



Then you make another extended curve like this:



Now you have a 4-sided boundary that can be surfaced with either Sweep or Network:



Then trim that with either a line or mirror it over and trim the 2 mirrored pieces against each other.

You give up direct control over the area that will be generated by the trim - but you can influence that area by putting in some additional section lines to control the shape of the surface in that area.

This method will tend to give you the smoothest result that looks like it's made from one continuous piece because it actually is made from one continuous single surface.

The other possible way to do things is to divide up the 5-sided boundary by having some more curves inside of it, but then you will have multiple surfaces making it up and it will be difficult to make it all look as smooth and naturally continuous as this method.

3DM file of this example attached. I also used the Rebuild command to simplify some of the curves into smooth pieces to make for better end surface quality as well:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#rebuild


- Michael