Tutorial series: Solid modeling basics
What you'll learn
Design a body for your waterpick model using new techniques like setting up construction planes, creating scaffolding, and using Loft all to create a curved shape. Then fine-tune adding chamfers and fillets to the waterpick body that accurately represents the waterpick.
Transcript
00:00
In this next video for the solid modeling basics, we're going to take a look at creating a body for this entire water pick here. And we're going to use a couple of new techniques that we haven't used yet. The first one is going to be using a couple of lofts to create a sort of curvaceous body for this water pick. The first thing that we're going to do here is create a plane that we can start building off of. So this is our origin plane here.
00:29
I'm just going to make a construction plane that is 25 millimeters below the surface. And the next thing I'm going to do is create the very bottom surface of the body for this water pick. So I'm going to again add another construction plane. I'm going to select our origin plane and I'm going to make another sketch plane that is going to be 175 millimeters.
00:57
With those two planes set up, we're going to start making some sketches on those planes and then lofting between sketches.
01:07
I'm going to create a new sketch on the surface.
01:12
And what I'd like to do is just make a basic shape. And I'm going to use some lines here to help me create a scaffolding for our geometry. And that way I can make a pretty curvy shape.
01:35
So we're going to use some sketch constraints.
01:40
We're going to do a midpoint. We're going to make this horizontal. I'm going to make this one vertical.
01:51
And we're going to put that on our origin line. And then I'm going to use an arc here to just define this front surface. I'm going to do the same thing here.
02:09
make a nice curved section. This.
02:16
And I'm also going to make these two sections symmetrical or equal.
02:24
And that's going to be our body shape for right now. The other thing I want to do is make a quick line out here so I have something to snap to. And the other components here that are inside of this body, I'm going to make construction lines. So I'm going to just select all of these and turn them into construction lines just like that.
02:49
We have our first sketch complete.
02:53
The next sketch I'm going to make on the bottom plane here, and I'm just going to use a projection to copy that top sketch back down. We're going to create a sketch here.
03:06
and I'm going to type P for project, and then I'm going to just select all of these lines here, and I'm going to use that line there as well. So that's going to project down to our bottom surface just like that. I'm now going to make a new sketch on the side plane. I'm going to sketch here, and I want to define the overall shape of this water pick.
03:34
The first one, I'm going to just make a front section here. We're going to use these as guide curves in our loft. I'm going to just very gently make a curve here. And I'm also going to do the same thing.
03:51
underneath here.
03:56
and turn on previous sketch that we used. I can turn on this sketch here.
04:06
just like that.
04:10
And then I'm going to use this sketch over here to make this back spine. Just like that.
04:20
So now we want to make a handle here that is relatively conforming to the hand. And the way that I'm going to do that is using a spline. So I'm just going to draw a spline section here. And I'm going to just roughly outline how I want this to look. We'll go in and edit it as we complete this. So I'm going to turn this.
04:49
I'm going to bring this in a little bit.
04:57
that's not as sharp.
05:01
And one of the things that I could be doing here to make this more controllable is building a scaffolding.
05:10
Let's go with this right here. Just like that. That looks pretty good. The other thing that we're going to do here now is start to do lofts between surfaces. So I'm going to hide this body, this initial body here that we don't need anymore. I'm going to turn that off. And then we're going to do two lofts. I need to hide this sketch as well. So the way I'm going to do that is
05:40
create a new sketch, gonna put this on our top plane, and I wanna still grab this circle from earlier, so I'm gonna do another projection of this circle right here.
05:55
pretty good. And then finally this sketch here is going to get in our way so I'm going to hide that as well. And we have everything we need now to make lofted profiles. So the first thing is I'm going to select our main plane. I'm going to select a loft and then I'm going to select our secondary plane. And then we're going to use these two edges here as guide curves. And really the edges there are just intersecting the profiles.
06:24
or just trying to use those to better influence the shape. And then click Done. That's our first loft. And I need to get our newest sketch back so that I can use the guide curves again. I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm gonna use this surface here. I'm gonna click More, I'm gonna select Loft. I'm gonna select this bottom surface.
06:51
And then we're going to use these guide curves to influence that shape. That's looking pretty good right there.
07:03
Now that these solids are created, the thing that we can do is start to assemble the body and finish up some filleting. So the first thing we're going to do is select those two bodies and create a union. Now we have one solid apart. And then the other thing that I want to do here is create a small fillet that goes all the way around this top edge.
07:29
I'm going to drag this out. I don't want it to be super aggressive.
07:35
And then I'm going to come in here and fill it all of these edges as well.
07:52
just like that. And then this last fillet here, I want to make a little bit more aggressive.
08:04
And we can pull this out just like that. We're going to call this four. That looks good to me. There you go. Now we have a fully filleted body that is representative of the water pick. And I can turn on our initial body here.
08:30
And that shows our completed item. In the next video, we're going to talk about some industry best practices as it relates to the things that we've constructed in this video series. There's a bunch of different tips and techniques that we can take advantage of to improve our CAD modeling ability.
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About the instructor
Andrew Camardella is an Industrial Design Consultant and Faculty member at DePaul University, with a diverse background stemming from his passion for creation, tinkering, hacking, and experimentation. His expertise in the product development process and proficiency with various digital tools enable him to seamlessly translate concepts, 3D models, prototypes, and products between physical and digital realms, enabling clients to address user needs and tackle complex design and manufacturing challenges. His extensive design and fabrication experience spans multiple industries, including consumer and commercial products, large-scale art, digital imaging, packaging, environment design, green design, and instructional content development for a wide range of clients including tech startups, consumer goods companies, artists, and inventors.