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When you’re on the road with a dog, one thing you learn pretty quickly is that your choices for food are limited because most places won’t allow dogs inside, not even little lap dogs.  I think we must’ve visited every single fast food place along I-70 on the way to Ohio and every single one along I-80 on the way back. Too much junk food!  Master Andrew seemed pleased, however, since he managed to collect a few of those little toys called Funkeys that came included with his kid’s meal.  I borrowed this one as my inspiration for a surfacing exercise.

This one is my version of the funkey. It doesn’t look exactly the same, but I’m excited no matter what. I know it’s not perfect and there’s probably a bunch of things I should’ve or could’ve done differently. I certainly appreciate comments and corrections, but remember I’m just a novice at surfacing, so go easy on me.

This has the potential of becoming a huge post, so I’ll probably have to break it down in pieces. Let’s start with the body.

The first thing I did was to create some geometry that would help me build the shape of the funkey. I sketched a spline on the Top plane that would follow the silhouette of the funkey’s body when seen from the front or from the top if you think of it as laying down on its back.  I only needed one half of the silhouette, since I was planning on taking advantage of the symmetry by constructing only half of the body and mirroring it with respect to the Front plane.

On the Front Plane, I sketched a spline that would be the parting line for the body when seen from the side. I don’t really have much knowledge of plastic mold design, but I observed the toy and the parting line followed this curvy shape all along the body.  Notice that I almost have no dimensions on my sketches and almost all of them are under defined. This was really an exercise and I was constantly dragging and moving spline handles and points, but I suppose that you could define the sketch completely if that’s what you wish to do.

Next, I used Insert, Curve, Projected, to create the parting line for the body as the projection of the first and second splines I had sketched previously.  Make sure to use the option Sketch on Sketch for this one. The curve created this way is a spline and it’s a 3D sketch because it’s not resting on any plane.

I sketched a third spline on the Front plane. This will be the sketch that follows the shape of the lower half of the body when seen from the side (Front plane).  Again, I don’t really have dimensions because I was constantly playing with the shape of the body, but I have a few relations in place. First there’s a piercing relation between this spline and a circle that I sketched on a plane I called Neck Plane.  The funkey has a circular neck.  By adding relations between the splines and this circle I’m trying to help shape the transition.  On the other end of the sketch, you’ll notice some construction lines and some tangent and perpendicular relations.  One of the construction lines is tangent to the parting line created previously. Another construction line was made perpendicular to the first one and the new spline (lower half sketch) is made tangent to this second line.  I wanted to add draft, and that’s why you see another two lines separated by a 2 degrees angle. My plan was to make my spline tangent to this other construction line, but the shape wasn’t really good, so I decided not to try to add draft, at least until I practice more and learn proper ways to do it.  By the way, those grey lines you see between the points of the spline are what is called the control polygon. I find that I have a better time controlling the shape of a spline by dragging the points in the control polygon than by manipulating the handles. To see the polygon, just right click on the spline and select Display Control Polygon.

Next, I created a series of planes, parallel to the Right plane that would help me sketch cross sections of the body. The purpose of these cross sections was to aid me in the process of creating a surface loft.

Each one of the sections was a two point spline. One end of the spline had a piercing relation to the parting line (the 3D sketch created as a projected line) and the other end had a piercing relation to the lower half sketch.  The spline was made tangent to a vertical line on one side and a horizontal line on the other.

Next, I used the cross sections as profiles to create a surface loft, and the parting line and lower half sketch as the guide curves.

This gave me part of the lower half of the body, but there was still some of it left to do. I decided to use Fill Surface to build a patch on that area. You know, when I think about it, there’s other things I could’ve done, like a loft surface to fill up that part or simply change the way I did the loft, by using the parting line and lower sketch as profiles and the cross sections as guide curves. I probably would’ve needed less guide curves too, as many guide curves tend to make the result a bit bumpy. Yes, there’s other things I could’ve done, but I wanted to practice with fill surface so I went this way.

The first thing I needed to do was to create these two auxiliary surfaces you see here.

The edges of these three surfaces were then used as boundaries for the patch created with Fill Surface. Notice the curvature control for each of the edges. Two of them are Tangent and one is Contact.  According to the help document, “Contact creates a surface within the selected boundary. Tangent creates a surface within the selected boundary, but maintains the tangency of the patch edges. Curvature creates a surface that matches the curvature of the selected surface across the boundary edge with the adjacent surface.”  These settings worked for me because those were the ones that made the result look the smoothest, but I’ve found that you have to experiment with it a bit sometimes.

After this step, I hid the auxiliary surfaces, knitted the two lofts together and mirrored the result with respect to the Front plane.

The upper half of the body was made in exactly the same way, leading to this result.

Next, I created a plane parallel to the Neck Plane and used it to trim the surfaces, by using the Trim Surface command, with the plane as the trimming tool.

After knitting both halves together, I proceeded to create the neck.  First, I extruded a surface using the same circle I had sketched previously on the Neck Plane.

I trimmed this surface using a line I sketched on the Front Plane. I had previously segmented this line using Tools, Sketch Tools, Split Entities.

The idea was to partition the extruded surface in four equal parts to facilitate a loft between its edges and the edges of the rest of the body. As you can see in the image below, this surface loft uses the edges of both surfaces as profiles and the lower half sketch and a copy of the parting line (made by using Convert Entities on a 3D sketch) as guide curves.

I did something similar for the other edge, except now using the upper half sketch; instead of the lower half sketch.

After that, I simply knitted both edges and mirrored the result with respect to the Front plane.

What I ended up with was this gourd-like shape that would be the body of my funkey. I know it’s not perfect. I played with the profiles and splines for a bit, trying to make it look a bit better. It could be smoother, but it’s a good start, I guess.  Next time, I’ll show you what I did for the rest of the funkey.

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