Official Luthiers Forum!

Can someone point me to some advanced tutorials or at least rules for filleting in Rhino. This seems to be my biggest hangup. Getting better but still having problems with what I think should be simple.

edit: found this page. Will go through it and report back. Still welcoming any and all pointers though.

http://wiki.mcneel.com/rhino/advancedfilleting

Watch your mailbox soon. Video Tuts coming your way. you have been PMed.

Mike

_________________
I'm outside looking in, just farther from the window than most.

Thanks Mike. Looking forward to them.

Seems like there are a lot of rules to filleting that I need to dig deeper into. Not to mention the workarounds when they fail.

Have you tried joining the surfaces first, then select edges for fillets under solids menu? You can then do them in solids all at once. You can even adjust each end of a fillet to match a different radius.

_________________
How long is that in luthyears?

Hi Brett,

That does seem to work a lot better. There are still some do's and don'ts that I don't fully understand that aren't covered in the help files or tutorials I've done. I see the work that guys are doing on car designs and think guitars should be a piece of cake.

Fillets in Rhino are definitely one of those 'wiggle the shifter then push the clutch just like this and wish' parts of Rhino. That's one of the times I wish Rhino was parametric to a certain degree. When a fillet's going to fail in Solidworks, you can wiggle the parameters around to make it work before you hit 'Go'.

Sounds like Brett's on to something with the solids thing, maybe part of the advantage Solidworks has is that it's running a solids engine to do the fillets? Another trick John Watkins put me on to yeeears ago (nearly ten) is that sometimes changing the tolerance from 0.001 to 0.00001 can make fillets and booleans work when they were failing before. No idea exactly why that works to this day, but I suspect it's a case of rounding errors on surfaces which should be mating. Also explains why the joining thing works: they're defined as mating, so there's no mystery gap.

Anyway, fillets are almost my only gripe with Rhino. It just seems weird that it'd have absolutely peerless surface generation tools and then the basic feature generation tools would trip over their shoelaces sometimes.

_________________
Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services