How would you tackle a Carved Top Guitar?

 From:  Michael Gibson
4059.2 In reply to 4059.1 
Hi ugotaccpaced, it's hard to surface something directly from section cuts in increments like you show there when the boundaries of the sections are varying a lot in shape like that - that works better when things are more like a tube in shape.

But one general technique that could work for you would be to temporarily ignore the outer boundary of the shape and instead focus on making an initial just rectangular sheet that has the overall contoured shaping that you want, and then trim that.

That's often times a good way to produce a shape that follows some kind of outline boundary like in that shape.

So this technique looks something like this - draw some section curves something like this (draw in the Front view and then move them apart in a different view):



Then use the Loft command to build a surface from that like this:



You normally don't want to use too many section curves since if you use a lot of them it kind of puts a lot of pressure on the surface to go through them all and can introduce wiggles kind of easily. You tend to get a higher quality less wiggly surface if you use a fewer number of sections. I mean use enough to control what you want but don't think that it's automatically good to put in more sections and have 1 every millimeter or something like that.

Then you go to the Top view and draw in a profile curve like this:



Now use that profile to trim the surface - it will cut it into 2 pieces and you can discard this part here:



Which will leave you with this kind of a surface:




This kind of technique can be helpful in general to try and somewhat ignore the outline of the shape initially and focus more on its overall surface form, especially when the surface is not really shaped by the outline itself but is sort of more cut off at the outline. With such a shape you usually want to employ a cut to make it as well. Sometimes it's hard to initially see this if you are focusing too much on using the cutting edge profile as some primary way to create the surface (like trying to sweep directly along the outside profile to create the top surface for example).


Also another variation which actually may be more convenient and maybe I should have put up first instead is to extrude the top outline first to make an initial solid like this:



Then build a loft as above, which will divide that solid into 2 pieces like so:



Now you can select the extruded solid, and run the boolean difference command and use the lofted surface as the cutting object, that will slice the extrusion into 2 pieces like this:



And you then delete the top piece:



This other technique lets you end up with a solid result with the side and bottom pieces all in place already.


Hope this helps!

- Michael