I'm sorry to ask such a basic question, but I'm too much of a newbie...

I started modeling a strat guitar body to start learning the process. I can make the basic shape of the body in multiple ways...

1. draw the curve outlining the body, create a slab, use curve to to cut the body out of the slab.

2. use the curve and extrude a solid from it

3. ????

Which is the preferred method or is it irrelevant?

I'd post an image, but I'm not sure what people do capture a partial screenshot to insert in these posts. Should I download a utility of some sort?

Thanks much,

Jeff

Hi Jeff, well there's not really just one way to do it, any way that gets the final job done is fine! :)

It can generally be convenient though to keep things more as solids, keeping things as a solid and then carving pieces off of it.

That tends to be convenient because you can carve a solid by doing a boolean with it just with a 2D curve that you have drawn, and the boolean between a solid cut by a 2D curve will give a solid result, constructing the sort of "side walls" of the 2D curve automatically as part of the process.

So probably doing an extrusion of the base outline to make an initial solid and then cutting off the top of the extrusion would be a good method.

See this previous post for an example of a couple of different methods:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4059.2

- Michael

Hi Jeff,

> I'd post an image, but I'm not sure what people do
> capture a partial screenshot to insert in these posts.
> Should I download a utility of some sort?

I use an image editing program called PaintShop Pro to do this, several kinds of image utilities can have this function in them, you might try a free one called IrfanView.

Also you can actually take a screenshot just by pushing the PrintScreen key on your keyboard which is a built-in Windows function that makes a screenshot and places it onto the clipboard as an image, which you can then paste into an image editing program (including Windows paintbrush if you don't have anything better).

- Michael

I would point you to jing as a very simple, easy, and free to use screen capture program. It does both pictures and video capture.

http://www.techsmith.com/jing/

Also Windows Vista and 7 have a built in capture program called the "snipping tool."

If you have Windows 7 you can use the Snipping tool


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