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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
    Posts
    9

    Modeling musical instruments in Rhino

    Hi everyone, I am a luthier, I have been building exclusively by hand for 20 yrs. I recently started looking at CAD and CNC.

    I don't have a machine yet but I have been learning rhino since a couple of weeks. I am starting this thread to show some of my 3D doodles and ask some real newbie questions.

    Newbie question number 1: What is going on when there's still some gaps in the rendering even though there is no naked edges to be found ? I use the join 2 naked edges command and everything looks closed but I can still see gaps in the rendering. Rhino won't let me draw lines in the gap to run a sweep or patch or anything because it seems to think that there is no gaps.... Any ideas ? Thanks in advance

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Posts
    133

    Re: Modeling musical instruments in Rhino

    Join2Edges is a sledge hammer that forces the edges to join regardless of the quality. If your surfaces won't join normally then you've got problems with surface (quality) edges matching close enough and that needs to be fixed rather than beaten with the hammer. Surface issues need to be fixed properly or you can end up with gouges or dips/rises that take forever to sand out. First off adjust your mesh settings under options. Choose custom then zero out all boxes except the bottom and put in 5000. This will increase the processing requirements and file sizes but will let you see what's happening better. Too many possible causes for surface issues without seeing an example. The McNeel Rhino3d discourse forum is a good place to get help. Just remember anything you upload to any public forum will end up on grabcad or in somebody else's guitars so best to post snippets or examples that show your issues without giving your designs away.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
    Posts
    9

    Re: Modeling musical instruments in Rhino

    Thanks Rand, I will look at the mesh settings. After the easy part of learning basic Rhino I now see that I am entering the more tricky aspect of CAD. The gap I was talking about occurs between a flat and a curved surface, so I think the problem might be that the curved surface doesn't meet the flat one tangentially although I tried. Anyway it is a minuscule gap of a few hundreds of a mm but I would like to really get things perfect and not get too lazy.

    Ok so it seems to me that the real art of CAD starts when you know the basics and you start having to solve this kind of issue. I have done hours of tutorials (Lynda's Rhino essential training and lots on YouTube) but these problems do not occur so you can't learn to solve them.

    I saw some tuts that I didn't do yet that were about more complex surfaces, I will look into these as the issues I am encountering might be addressed there.

    And yeah I will be careful to not post stuff that I want to protect, the pics above are just eyeballed designs for practice. Thanks for the good advices...

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Posts
    133

    Re: Modeling musical instruments in Rhino

    You've done some nice work with your samples. In general it's important to keep the point count on the geometry to a minimum and to use the simplest surface possible (forget about using patch surfaces). Use match to assure that the geometry defining the surfaces and boundaries are at least C1/G1 or better for the geometry C2/G2. NURBS are 4 sided surfaces so do a paper & pencil sketch of how to partition the shape you are looking for into 4 sided chucks with the geometry that drives that. Surface flow is critical, how should the surface flow to attain the shape. Look for car oriented tutorials because those surfaces need to be kept very simple to maintain the kind of quality needed for large shiny objects. One very cool tutorial is: 3D Car Modeling with Rhinoceros the reviews on the book are poor due to errors, the PDF is supposed to better and there is a forum although I haven't looked there in a while. The author has since been recruited to an ID job at Apple in Cupertino. There are others on YT that are free. There are lots of experts that know Rhino very well that can help you via the McNeel forum.

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