Quick modeling a quad bike

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Hey, I'm Sam and I do design, and in the video today, I'm showing you how I quickly model, analyze, and compare projects in Shapr3D. What I like to do is sketch everything out first in 2D orthographic views before bringing it into the 3D software. That really helps me come up with so many different options, so many different iterations without the need to think in three-dimensional space. So we're now in a brand new file, and I can come over and select the left plane, which is where I want to import the image.

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I can come over and press import, press file, and here's that collection of all those different sketches I mentioned before. I can find the correct one that I want to model today and import that, and there we go. It's now imported because we had the left plane already selected. It's imported on the correct plane that we wanted. Now you'll notice it says 44 millimeters across, and I want this quad bike to be bigger than 44 millimeters across. So that's no problem. I can simply press done.

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Come back to the center plane, the left plane, and I can draw a line where I know what the wheelbase is going to be, 1,650. I can draw that line, select the origin, and press midpoint. And that means that that line is now perfectly centered, and that is the wheelbase. I can select it and then come over to scale and...

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What I can actually do is move this central scale area here, right, and I can move that to roughly where that's going to go. I can scale up to make sure that our wheelbase is over the line. Now that we've got this sketch in here, it's just a case of tracing it out and modeling the shape. So I can start off here by using our original sketch, and maybe I want to start with the wheels. And what I can do is just model one wheel.

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And then duplicate it across the whole part.

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You can spend more time on this. I'm just doing this for the tutorial. There you go. It really is a case of just pushing and pulling. Let's say I want to soften some of these edges off. Really nice and easy having the fillet function. And then even with the fillet function, we can decide how crisp or how chamfered that is within the fillet itself. I really love using that. And essentially, there is one wheel built. What we can then do,

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is select the whole thing by double-clicking, moving the wheel out to where we think it might need to be, and then by double-clicking again, and this time moving it with the copy function, I can move that further back, and then there we have the wheels in 3D space. Now you'll notice when I press copy just then, there was a link button, a chain button, and that means that the...

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So let's say, for example, I want to change with our history tree over here, I want to change the exact extrusion that we had here, and that was 350 millimeters. If I now say I want that to be 300 millimeters, then the whole thing updates. So then what we can do is mirror this across the central plane. And if we have a look over on the other side, we've got the basis of our quad bike there.

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Now, one of the biggest tips I have for efficiently model-making so that you can make duplicates and have all different options and different solutions later on down the line is actually a really boring fact, which is you need to name all of your parts so you know what they are later on. I know it's a really boring tip to have to make sure that your file management is in check, but it really helps you save time later on. So what I can do to do that is select our bodies that are the wheels,

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simply make a new folder, and then rename that folder to wheels. That's going to be really easy to make sure that we know where everything is. So in exactly the same way now, I'm just gonna go through and trace the model, trace the quad bike. And what I can do is go back into that original sketch and start adding the rest of the quad bike. So for example, I can come up here, start drawing the wheel arches, and let's say that I want that to be concentric at all times to our wheel. And I can say,

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I want to have the footplate as well, and I want those two to be concentric. And it is literally a case of drawing out our different parts. And now as I start to move this into place, you'll see that it's coming together quite nicely. And what I can do is start to dimension some of these things. Another tip that I have is actually to just model in the most basic versions of the forms that you can really early on.

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What we're going to start doing is duplicating the model later on and making small tweaks and changes, and making sure that your model is as simple as possible at that point will really help the file. Okay, with the main sections now modeled in, I can start to simply push and pull some of these elements and start to make the chassis. So I can pull out this way just by selecting those faces. And as I pull out all of these different bodies, you'll notice here we can have...

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a union, so we just connect it to the previous body that we just made. We have subtract, intersect, but at this early stage, I like to use new body, and that means that everything is going to be its own new body. Very quickly, we have the quad bike model. We can turn the wheels back on, and at this point, I can carry on pulling and pushing the model, or I could go into the feature tree at this point and say, okay, this extrusion here was 450; actually, I want it to be 500.

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And then it's going to move out. And also what you'll notice here that I'm doing is only modeling half of the quad bike because we can multiply it over and mirror it later on. Now that we're at this really basic stage, what I want to do is make sure and double check that we are definitely in the right scale. And to do that, I can import other objects that I know the scale of. You might have certain components that you're building around, whether it's PCBs or batteries, or you might know the exact...

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diameter of the wheels that you're using. Anything that you can take reference from in real life, now is a really good time with the basic form finished to import it into the file. In my case, I know the height of an average person. So what I can do is find a model online of a motorbike rider. We come over to the three little buttons here, press import and file, and then instead of selecting...

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these sketches, I can come over to where I've saved these people, and that's really easily going to import it in. Nice and easily, we can move that person around in exactly the same way. And this quad bike is a fairly big quad bike. It's for off-roading, it's an electric quad bike, it's for long distances. Looking at it here, I think this is roughly about the right size. So with that peace of mind, we can carry on modeling.

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So let's say that you've built a piece of your model where the entire piece is one solid section and we actually want to cut out the seat from that section. And that's really easy to do because what we can do is create the seat and we can do what's called a Boolean function. And that's really a fancy way of saying we can add parts, we can subtract parts using other parts in the model. So what I do is double click on this to make sure it's selected, hide it in the items tree,

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then double click on the one that we want to subtract. Then we can go to subtract and then keep originals of. Now this basically says, do you want to use it as an eraser? Do you want to use it as a cutting tool and keep anything in there? I want to press keep removed bodies in this instance because what we're doing is taking away from the plus side and we're taking away the minus side. So by doing that and saying we want to keep...

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the removed bodies, then we can see now that I've got these two parts separately in the file. So that's a great way to quickly cut away and build really simple forms and then cut back and make sure that you have more complex forms and more intricate scenarios later on. In exactly the same way, we can do it with the front pieces here, and instead of subtracting, I can press union, and then this is all one single part.

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So I think this model is actually good enough to multiply across so they have the final...

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dimensions just by pressing mirror. And then we can go ahead again, union everything. There's a few pieces that I forgot over at the back here. So I can come over to our feature tree, press edit, make sure that we have those selected, and then it's done for us there. So we're nearly ready to start comparing multiple versions of this quad bike, but there are a few extra details I want to add in before that. Number one of which is...

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The handlebars.

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And the other thing that I want to do is you'll notice on the sketch is that I had this cutout here of the main body. And what I can do for that is to come into the original sketch and I can just double tap to start editing. And what I want to do is draw an arc that basically is concentric to our front wheel. So everything is nice and concentric. And I want to make a solid body out of this eventually.

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And that will be a solid body that we can sort of throw away, right? We're using this to start cutting up the object in more ways. It can hide everything that we don't need, pull out this, and we'll use this as a throwaway body for this particular surface. So what we'll do, we'll show our main body.

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Double click it, so we have the main body that we want to split fully selected, and we have the splitting profile selected in that face. And you'll notice that it now says split body, so I want to do that. And you can see the target and where we are splitting, so I'll just press yes on that. Then honestly, we can delete that. And we can see now that this has a really nice split running all the way through the part, so that now these are...

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two separate parts entirely. So with that all done now, what we can do is start to add some real materials to this. Now, the reason why I want to add real materials and materials that look as realistic as possible is that it can actually start to change the proportions and how this thing looks, how this thing appears in the real world. So what I can do is start to add things like carbon fiber to the chassis underneath. I just think that would be...

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quite nice to add underneath there. What I think, there is this rubber tire, and while that is really nice, I think it's quite dark, as you can see here. What I like to do for rubber pieces is to bring it over like a silicon rubber, and then adjust that silicon rubber to a slightly darker material like this. Then I have some nice detail, right? So I can choose different materials to make it look correct.

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Also, if I want to change a specific surface, I can click on that surface, no problem, and come up here and start to adjust, and that's just of that single surface itself, okay? And that happens, that will start to split objects out here. So again, I can drag and drop.

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And there we have it, nicely textured, so that we can really start to see proportions of this quad bike. Now we can duplicate these out again and again, and with each and every one, change something ever so slightly, and we have it all in one file that we can compare really easily. I would suggest if you're working really early on, and you are doing these little incremental changes and coming up with these different ideas, this ideation, moving through like you would a sketchbook.

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I would suggest keeping everything into one file like I'm about to do here. Once you start to have a finalized solution, that's when you can go into a fresh file and build everything from scratch parametrically. But now that we have this, I can come over and select everything and copy. And you'll notice again, now that we have this link, this time I think we should uncheck this link because we want to make sure that we're differentiating each of our concepts from now on, right?

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So I would just keep copy pressed, uncheck the link, and then move everything across. Let's keep it to a nice and even 2000. So you'll notice here that if you do keep the linking on, then when you copy it all across, then our folders stay nicely done. If you make sure that the linking is turned off at this point, because we wanna make everything different to each other, then we end up with all of the bodies.

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Don't forget it's really important to keep your file as clean as possible.

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There we go. Now that we've got three different copies of this quad bike, we can start to look at how we can adjust some. So for example, I might come over here to the footplate and I might say, actually I want to start cutting out some of this footplate. So really quickly, and because again, we are very early on in the ideation process, we can just naturally cut this out without worrying about symmetry right now, right? We're just getting...

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the ideas down on paper. We'll build it all from scratch properly later on. So with each and every one, I can think about adjusting. And then for example, I could say this one could be filleted on this side even. I don't even have to do the whole thing as its own design. I could say this side, I wanna try and chamfer that just to see how it looks. And then I can compare over the two sides. So what I can do is...

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move this rear spoiler, and let's say we want to make this a really big rear spoiler, I would select the faces that I want to move, come over here and press the move rotate, and at this point we can start to push and pull, but for some extra accuracy, what we can do is move the gimbal to a specific location and move it in that orientation. So you'll see now it's aligned to the line that we want to move it across.

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And I can move it exactly 60 millimeters or 61 millimeters or type in exactly how far we want to go. And that means that we can be much more accurate and much quicker as well. What I can also do is look at the move tool elsewhere on the design. So let's say I don't want to keep these chamfers, I can just come in here, delete it. Let's say that I want to move this surface in a way that creates a really nice, interesting...

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curve along this panel, so I can move this up. So by moving that part, moving that line, we can see that we can get some interesting curves here. Same again over here, we come up and align the gimbal, align the move tool, and then pull down slightly.

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And now that we have this really organic-looking kickstand here, we could apply that to other sections if we want to, or we could come over and maybe we scale something. So let's say, let's select these front ones. We click on scale and then just very easily drag in. And you can see there that, let's say, 0.5.

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Now that we've got this thinner section at the front, and I can fillet this back off. So then quickly we've got this really interesting variable thickness, quite sculptural front side. We've got this S-curve sculptural side panel here, all off the back of just pushing and pulling various lines once we have them in the CAD. Now we have three completely different models. There's another step we can do to really ensure and definitely...

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double check that we're working to the right scale. What I can do is import in exactly the same way that we imported the photo, I can import this character that again, I found online, and I can position them to the handlebars, then use the gimbal to adjust that person to be riding on the bike as it was.

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And let's just clean that up so we can see using the isolate selection, right? So I'm making sure that you have everything selected and then pressing isolate really helps clean these files up. And what I've noticed with this is that actually the footplate could probably do with some more space, right? And what I could do is just go in and start to adjust, right? I can just live edit the file. I think that was 35 originally, there we go. Or I could...

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Instead of adjusting everything here, and I would have to then do it on the other side as well, I could turn on my original sketch, and this is really useful because you saw me at the start add all of our different constraints in, this is going to be really useful as I live edit the part and all of the other pieces update as well, right? So as I increase the space here, you can see the back moving slightly, and that's really useful for everything to update nicely.

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So we have so many options here, right, to live edit and just push and pull faces, or go back into previous sketches and update everything there. So with that all done, I think we're at a good point where we can really start to compare each of these. And to do that, we can come up over to the visualization tool. And that is amazing because now all of the properties and all of the different materials really have a chance to shine, right, using the carbon fiber,

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using stuff like the padded texture on the fabric, on the leather, using everything like the glossy material and seeing how our compressed sculptural surface differs compared to our flat plane surface like we have over here. And at this point, we can start to export different files by pressing the camera button over here. Now taking a photo is amazing because you can share it with other departments, whether it's other designers, other engineers,

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other marketing, you can send it to people who don't have the CAD programs but can look at the objects. But what I love to do personally is to press this big share button over here and just press create link. Now, what does that mean? Well, just with one single link, the people that you send this to can view this on their own tablet just by clicking the link. It's so easy to do. Once the link is created, you have access to...

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password-protected if it's confidential information, and also using Shapr3D's augmented reality tools. And to show you how that works in real life, I'm about to go and visit my local park to view these quad bikes in their natural habitat.

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So from importing a sketch to within the space of about 20 minutes having three different quad bikes to choose from, you can see how Shapr3D really helps me compare models effectively. So if you have any questions about this process, I'd love to hear them down in the comments below. Thank you again to Shapr3D for inviting me to make another one of these videos. I love making them for you. I've been Sam Guilt. I'm an industrial designer working in London. You can find me at my YouTube channel.

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Over at Sam Does Design. Thank you all for watching so much, and I'll see you all in the next video.