When it comes to surfacing with BobCAD you have lots of options but it’s not always clear what tools to use and why…. Today I had a chance to speak with Hugh about his guitar modeling projects and some of the challenges he was facing. After many attempts of creating a smooth transition surface for his prototype guitar Hugh had reached his limit.
“I just can’t figure this out; I am frustrated” is an all too common scenario that we’ve all been in at one time or another. After many attempts the result Hugh was getting didn’t provide the result he was looking for.
There was a missing ingredient that wasn’t apparent to Hugh which I was happy to fill him in on: Using splines for surfacing.
Hugh had been using lines and arcs to make up his wire frame. He did a great job of laying the profile out, but when it came to making this transition surface the results were faceted, and even bulged in different areas.
Using splines to develop his profiles allowed the surfaces he created to be “smoother” and instead of being broken up into smaller surface segments, he got one surface for the complex curves he was working with.
Instead of using a skin or four edge surface he found that using a surface fillet was much easier to do and the result was dead on.
This video walks though how to use the fillet between surfaces to get the result Hugh is after:
