Integration of Textiles in Fusion 360

MIKE AUBREY: Well, good afternoon, everyone. I want to kick things off today with a super bold statement.

[LAUGHTER]

Textile-based product design demands iteration to innovate. I want to kick things off with a second super bold statement. Recent advances in online software play a huge role in achieving that innovation.

Again, good afternoon, guys. Let's take back a second here and I wanted to just say, that my name is Mike Aubrey. I'm one of the Technology Evangelists here at Autodesk. And welcome to Autodesk 2016. Are you guys enjoying it so far?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

MIKE AUBREY: Yes. That is the right answer. So every day I get the opportunity to work with customers like yourselves to help empower you to be successful using our tools. So I've been with Fusion since it became a product three, four years ago. [INAUDIBLE]. I've got about 10 years of experience. I'm a Mechanical Engineer by background, which I think is really unique for this set of people because my academic background is probably different from yours. But it's been really rewarding to be involved in this part of designing things. Because at the end of the day it's all about solving issues and solving problems. And so the types of things I get to work on, if you guys saw-- did you guys see the Extruder Bot. Yeah, so that's what I've been doing the last seven months. That, and if you saw the Hack Rod, that was another one of the things, that chassis, I did a lot of the modeling on that. So that's where I come from. But anyway, that's enough about me.

The real star of this afternoon is a guy named Mr. Bill Dieter. And he is an amazing badass. And you're going to like him. But I'm going to let him give his own introduction [INAUDIBLE]. Meet Bill.

BILL DIETER: Hi, guys. So I'll give you a little bit of my background. We'll-- I'm going to talk just briefly about my company, which we do things a little differently. And it's-- we've been using Fusion a lot lately. And it's really cool how it's been plugging in.

So Terrazign is a product design firm that's been around for 22 years. And our focus has always been textile based product design. And we also get into hard goods. And we're really interested in that intersection between hard goods and soft goods, and how do all of these things work together? We'll work with all kinds of textiles. So knits, wovens, non-wovens, membranes, leathers, synthetic leathers, there really isn't a material we won't touch. But the-- and the projects that we get into are just as diverse. So we'll get into projects that are for consumer electronics, sports and fitness stuff, and aerospace. I've also done automotive. It's pretty much-- we'll cover the gamut, even get into medical stuff. But let's talk just briefly.

Oh, let me-- let's hold on that for a second. Actually, can go back a second, Mike? So what's different about us, as a firm, most design firms will-- the client comes in, they'll do a lot of sketches, and then they move into either renderings, or you'll move into CAD, and eventually you'll get to doing some prototypes. You may even send out for those prototypes. We go about a little differently. And there's a strong reason why. We may do few sketches. We basically move immediately into prototyping. And so prototyping is our primary way of drawing and sketching. And that's how we work. And you may say, well, why do you work that way? Because that's not the fastest way to work. Well, working with textiles, you can't-- you can draw it all day-- and I don't care what program you're running-- you can draw it all day. And until you start actually working with it-- because every piece has different characteristics, different stretches, and hands, and thicknesses-- and so we need to experience that and see what's going to happen. So over the years we have just gotten very deep into prototyping as quickly as we can. And we've added in a great deal of process that allows us to prototype very rapidly.

So let's go through some of the types of projects we get into. This is a harness that we did for NASA. And it's used to hold the astronauts to the treadmill on the space station. So the short answer is, why do you need to do that? It's like, well, there's no gravity. They need to work out. And they need the impact of running to maintain muscle mass but more importantly, bone density. So our job is very simple, hold them down. And we're going to hold them down to their body weight. But it has to be comfortable.

So this is a very interesting project that we went through quite a few iterations developing a comfortable harness that hit all of the requirements for flight materials. And that's actually the difficult part of this project is, materials that won't burn. The space station is oxygen rich environment, everything wants to burn. And on that project, we have actually become the manufacturer. So it's-- we're an unusual firm in that we can actually do manufacturing. But our only client that we manufacture for is NASA.

Most of our clients are large consumer goods. This is another good example. This is the UE Boom Speaker. And this project, the speaker itself was designed by an outside firm, but we were asked to figure out-- and we'd done a great deal of work with Logitech before. Logitech owns UE Boom, or owns UE-- and they asked us to figure out how are we going to wrap this thing? And this was going to be a very high volume speaker. And we needed to wrap it very rapidly in production. And it couldn't be a fussy thing. So we had two layers of fabric. It had to go in fast. And we went through a lot of different concepts of how to put it on accurately and quickly. And we ended up going with, actually loading the two pieces of fabric, in our injection molding equipment and shooting [INAUDIBLE] strips that allow it to just snap into place.

So we're looking at things beyond just sewing and bonding. And we're getting into all kinds of interesting processes. This is another one that's a good example. This is a new football helmet that is just now coming out on the market. And it's the Vicis helmet. It's a double shell helmet. And it's all about protecting the brain from football impacts. And we were very involved with the innermost padding system, which you can see up in the middle. And we went through a lot of tooling to figure that out and a lot of experimentation with different types of foam and in different impact tests as well. And we get into all that.

So our-- to do this, we have a very extensive-- if you're familiar with Pier 9, we have a facility very similar to Pier 9, except we go much heavier on the textile side. We have a very extensive machine shop. We get into water jet cutting, and laser cutting, and almost anything you can imagine, press brake, tube bending. And on the textile side we'll get into compression molding, and bonding, and fusing, and RF welding. And we play with it all. So we're a very vertical organization, in that we can do all these processes in-house. And for us, that's important because it's a big sketchbook. And that's going to be important for what we're talking about today, which is iterating quickly to try patterns, and getting into complex patterns, and then building them.

So we keep a lot of materials on hand. As we work through a project we'll start working with the mills to bring fabrics in, specifically for a project. But we also want to be able to play. And then our designers also work the whole way through a project. So for us, this iteration process is about exploration and learning how you're going-- the things you're going to learn as you go through the process. So our designers will actually be running the machinery as well and building everything. So we don't hand things off down the line. You stay with the project the whole time.

MIKE AUBREY: All right, time end. Why are we here? You guys know us now. Let's but what we're going to go through the class. So the objectives in this class today is, we're going to be showing you a workflow that we lovingly call, Project Vest because we made a vest. And the idea is, we wanted to build something functional, that everyone would easily identify with, and demonstrate how we could do a digital patterning workflow that was achievable-- with the caveat being, can we do it using almost all cloud software because Spoiler alert, I work for Fusion.

We're both based in Portland. We've got to be good friends over this stuff. And it was so rewarding to go out there and do real work with all the great people working in Portland. And this has been a really rewarding class to prepare for because I feel what we're about to share with you guys today is something that is-- it's frankly, it's red hot. When you look at the techniques that we used to do this, you're going to able to see applications of like, yeah, I've seen some tools approach it that way in the past. But then you remember one, how difficult they were to use, how disparate they were from the next tool along in the process, and then also, frankly, the cost.

This workflow we're showing you today literally didn't exist a year ago. And we're going to be showing you four different tools. And we'll get through what they are. But, yeah, as we're going through this, our point today is, we want to leave you guys inspired to go do product design with textiles and use some Fusion on the side, huh?

So everyone be cool. The first question I always get in these types of presentations is, can we have the videos? Yep, you can have the videos. Can you have the data set? No, you can't. This guy is proprietary. But this workflow-- hopefully, you guys take a look at how we got the scan. And if you guys are freaking out and you need your own human body stuff, I can help you go to GrabCAD and find one as well. But, yeah, we can't give you the actual data set. So as I said in the first thing, everyone be cool and we're going to have a great time.

Before we go too far, one of the things Bill and I were curious to know is a little bit about your backgrounds. I mean, how many people in here use Fusion? Yeah. I told you.

BILL DIETER: Awesome.

MIKE AUBREY: I told you. I told you. Good. So we're going to have a great time. How many people are directly involved in product design and textiles? OK, not as many.

BILL DIETER: No.

MIKE AUBREY: OK, this is good. So we'll try and curtail our speaking to be as educational for some of the new people that want to get into this stuff. I know there's a couple. [INAUDIBLE] on this.

Let's jump into it. So I guess, we always have to start off with why bother doing this? The textiles designing with patterned fabric stuff, that's existed for literally thousands of years, why change? Bill?

BILL DIETER: Well, I mean, as Mike said, it's 1,000 year-- I mean, we even know how old it is. But it's one of the oldest industries. And what we're seeing today is, we've got to move very rapidly to try things and experiment. And the number of materials that are being developed and what's happening on the digital side where we're starting to incorporate stuff, we've got to get in, try stuff, drop in circuitry, and see what that's going to do. Can we get to the fit we want? We get into a lot of wearable stuff. So we want to iterate quickly. And so using digital patterns and building models that are going to allow us to tweak those very quickly, we may spend a chunk of time, just as we would in more traditional patterning sense, building that first model. But after that, we're going to move very quickly and spit out a lot of series of patterns.

So as we started to imply, the industry is changing. It's evolving. So textiles used to be kind of a forgotten process. And there's a lot of people that just do not understand how fabrics, wovens, non-wovens, and knits are even made. But you're starting to see a lot more in the press. And there's several different things that are making that pop to the forefront. One is, things like embedded electronics. So you're seeing things like Google and what they're doing. And Google is by no means the only people working on that. They just seem to grab the press headlight on that one. But it's-- what they're doing is some very exciting stuff. You're seeing consumer electronics moving very heavily towards textiles. As things get smaller it's-- they become much more personal items. And so there's that tactile feel of textiles or leather. And so, how does that incorporate into the electronics that we use everyday? So it's a tactile piece.

And then, of course, the apparel side and the foot wear. We're seeing footwear with 3D printed outsoles. Nike's doing Flyknit uppers, which have completely blown the knit industry upside down. No one's quite sure what's happening there. But it is-- there is a complete revolution just within knitting. And so it's all very exciting stuff. And it's all moving very rapidly.

And so what we're going to look at today is, we picked a vest. And that vest represents an on body piece. And it could be anything. I mean, if we were doing a band that we were going to monitor with, that's an on body piece. So we just picked this as a piece. But we also wanted to build a vest that had a lot of details and stuff. So it's got to the evolution of a bag. So we're showing zippers and stuff like that being put in as well. So there's layers and stuff going on, which is where it gets more complicated. And we want to see what that workflow looks like to really push that through the system of something that's more complex. So packs are pretty complex. T-shirts aren't that hard, in terms of nailing it, in terms of the number of layers and stuff.

So-- is this you?

MIKE AUBREY: It's you.

BILL DIETER: It's me. OK. [LAUGHTER]

So Fusion-- and let me just say, Fusion is pretty new to me. I started working with these guys-- I wasn't even really aware of Fusion till April.

MIKE AUBREY: That sounds right [INAUDIBLE] April.

BILL DIETER: So somewhere around there I had been looking at stuff other than SolidWorks. We'd been using SolidWorks and Rhino quite a bit. And I just wanted to see a different workflow. And SolidWorks wasn't giving us what we really needed in the speed. And so I started doing kind of exploration of what was out there. And someone said, you've really got to check out Fusion. It's pretty interesting.

And so Mike Prom and Mike Aubrey came over. And we spent two hours. And I was like, I'm in. This is-- I can do something with this on the textile side. And so, as I'm speaking, you're going to hear me probably mispronounce-- not mispronounce-- but say things with the wrong terminology because I'm still not-- I'm an expert user, whereas Mike knows everything inside and out.

But what's been exciting about Fusion is how fast we can move in it. And it's a very forgiving platform. And we're able to get into compound curvature stuff and surfacing that in SolidWorks would have been very difficult. And then the collaborative side, we're finding really awesome in our studio. Because we'll just walk over to someone's terminal, and just pop it up, and like, yeah, that's what I was thinking. And so there's none of this, oh, I've got a-- what file version are you on? And that part has been tremendous. So

MIKE AUBREY: All right, guys. We're now to the meat part of the meal, Project Vest. So as Bill was talking about, we started Project Vest to uncover and validate commercially viable ways of using our tools. And so we wanted to create something that was easily recognizable and functional. And over the course of months-- we've been hanging out a day a week. We'd go over and just kick some time and try things. And we-- it was one of those things, fail fast. Iteration was one of those initial things we said was important. We've come up with this amazing process for you. And this flowchart actually is what we're going to be running you through today in this presentation.

So let me just run you quick through what the steps are. And then we're going to dig into the stuff. We have example video to share. And it comes up with this idea that you begin with what you originally get specked out from your customer and what they give you to work with. So this is in the form of digital models, or maybe they actually give you the mannequin, or the test subject to work with. And from that you move into a designing phase where you are designing upon that digitally provided asset. And then from there, that is what actually becomes what you then infabricate from. It's not a disparate process. It's connected. And that's why we'll-- we'll get to our ExactFlat friends here who want to do it. And then we're moving on to the point where you're trying to move through these iterations quickly. So we talk about being a use cycle of like, you're trying to get first, does it fit? That's one of the theories we'd get. It doesn't always fit. You get through that one and then after that, it's just all fun. You're going into details. You're out and pockets. You're adding zippers, all that amazing stuff.

And that is Mr. Burns, by the way, if you guys notice that little Easter egg.

BILL DIETER: He has his vest [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE AUBREY: So there are some software tools we're going to be showing you today to give you a little foreshadowing of stuff. If you guys saw any presentations-- I know a couple of you guys were in an Autodesk ReMake session this morning. This is going to be more of that. And it's all good stuff. We'll be doing some Fusion. We'll be doing some ExactFlat, which is our third party partner here, we're thrilled to have working with us. And then we're going to show you a really interesting workflow that Bill uncovered along the way about ways of making his own custom mannequins using a tool called 123D Make. We've got actually, a lot of really exciting workflows here to share with you that are part of this bigger process. We're really proud to be presenting it to you. And we hope you get some value out of it.

So the first section that we're starting off is, what is the forming process? So this is when you're working with the customer, you're going out there, you're gathering all those initial details of what you need to create, but then also, they give you something to work with. There's an assumption-- in the past it was like, OK, here's our model, or here's someone that you're going to be designing to. And our model today, I want everyone to meet Dave. Dave is a size medium, literally he's a size medium. And that's what we're working with. Bill's customer has these digital assets that they're provided. And what we're doing in the forming phase is that we are preparing our digital asset to be useful in the designing phase and the manufacturing phase.

This is different from conventional ways of doing pattern design because, in those ones, you're talking about laying, draping stuff over top of the mannequin. In this case, this literally is the mannequin. And so we have to treat it that way. Now the advantages to doing it this way-- I mean, it is more work up front. You guys will see it and drink the Kool-Aid hopefully, on it-- but the reason why-- I always remember why-- is that this can be used again and again. Once you've got this, you don't have to do this phase again. The next one is just instantly customizable because how many of you are actually an adult medium? And then the other thing, of course, is it's-- yeah, OK, one. Smart [INAUDIBLE].

[LAUGHTER]

BILL DIETER: Liars, you're all liars.

MIKE AUBREY: And then the third part is, of course, it's infinitely historical. We had a slide here where I was talking about-- I had a creepy closet of mannequins that go in there and Bill told me to take it out because it was too scary. But you can just store tons of these things. So what we're going through in this phase is actually a process of saying that we need to take this, a mesh-- when we talk about file formats being an OBJ or an STL, those are what they most commonly come in. And we're moving it through this process of going in-- there's a conversion process to get it to Fusion. It's saying we take it from an OBJ to make it a quad-OBJ. That's literally as much as you need to know about this, by the way.

And then we're in the fun stuff, where we're in Fusion. We're making sculpted, the file format there is, it's called a T-spline. But that's where you get to move. And in this case, we're going to be refining or removing detail to make it more idealized for actual design. And then from there we move into where we're actually designing. So we're in boundary representations, that's solid modeling. And then from there, that's where we go and we actually extract our services, which are also [INAUDIBLE]. They're just the services. So there's some technical terminology. I don't think you have to know much more than this to go through it. The devil's in the details, of course, and how you apply the different tools.

I mean, it is-- it's CAD modeling. And as I've said to Bill along the way, I can't think of any geometry that's harder than this from a modeling perspective when you think of all the crazy curves and the different shapes that come from it. I mean, this is some heavy stuff you guys deal with on a day-to-day basis. So I guess, props to you guys for digging into it. And we're not doing digger's here.

So in this phase, the forming, the preparation is everything. So everything compounds upon itself. So the further we go-- you might not notice a huge difference between these two models. But one, it determines how adaptable they are when we go to design. And the other one determines on how we're able to actually make them. Let me show you the examples.

So this extra detail right here represents a lot of these-- they're called star points, and we'll just go with them-- but if you're going to go and move different cuts between these different services that can cause instability in the models. So the less surfaces you can have in your upfront model, the more flexible and adaptable-- which was the point of why we're designing digitally in the first place. So do yourself a favor and invest the time to clean those types of things up.

The second thing you'll notice here, which might not be as easy to notice is, you'll notice that this guy's all super ripped out. He's got these sweet six pack abs. This guy's a little bit, well, it looks like he's wearing a shirt. Remember that the digital mannequin is literally going to become the textile. So you can't have all this crazy stuff. If your fabric isn't actually going to drape that way, you don't want your mannequin to have that. So those are two things that you have to look for when you're creating them. And so let's go through the workflow of what that would look like.

So we're going to be going into a tool that's called Autodesk ReMake. And what we're doing here is, it's basically the intermediary software that will allow us to prepare ourselves to go to Fusion. So I'm going to jump into this guy. So this is going to be the end result of what we finish with. And starting out, we use ReMake first off as, we call, a simplification tool. Fusion really likes to have less than 10,000 facets. I know it can do more. But ideally you want to have less than 10,000 connections in there. And that's going to help out with your graphics card.

So the first thing I'm doing here is, I'm using ReMake to decimate the model. And so, in decimating, you're removing enough detail that it still resembles what you originally had in it but you aren't bogging down your computer with all the extra detail. So that's one of the first things. You use ReMake just to decimate. The second thing you're using this thing for is, we're going to export it. And so you see right here is, it's just-- we're changing it from an OBJ to an OBJ quad. So what that actually is, is you see how these are all a bunch of triangles-- it's called a tet mesh [INAUDIBLE]-- the sculpting part of Fusion operates off of quads. And so, by going and making this conversion to quads, we now have a scanned model that we convert to something that we could actually design in Fusion. This is magic.

[LAUGHTER]

It's for anybody who has ever played around with getting scan data into a parametric modeling tool. What we have right here is, you go into Fusion, you import that OBJ quad. And then up here there's the convert button. And we go to say convert. And it'll pull itself in. So the stuff that you've got to be careful here-- remember, you do want to remove as much detail as you can get away with because that'll make it faster. But then once you have it in, it's really-- it's there. You're playing with it.

And so, now that we have it here, we now need to see, what can we actually convert to make it into a boundary rep sawed-- remember, the stuff that we can actually design on. So the first thing I'm going to do here is just say, finish it, and take a look at it. Over the last year, we've actually built in a lot of tools within Fusion to help identify some of those problem surfaces. So it's when things right here-- you'll see like, right here on this knee, there's a-- can we see these edges come together, those little points right there-- that's called a star point. And so what a star point is, is I mentioned how quads are squares. Well, if those squares aren't able to perfectly lineup, they have to converge. And you'll see five have to come together. And that's actually where the majority of these challenges come when you're going to convert to try both simplify for designing flexibility, and then also for manufacturing facility. You want to eliminate those.

So in this video I'm going to show you two techniques of what I was able to do here to eliminate those star points, the unnecessary ones, some of them you need. So the first one is, let's simplify the model. So here we're designing a vest. So I literally don't need some of that geometry that actually in all irony, is giving me the trouble. It's very convenient that it's the knee that is the problem. So let's just get rid of the knee. So where the technique comes in here, rather than just windowing the whole thing, like, just lop off half of it-- that actually takes about two or three minutes to do if you've ever tried to select that many t-splines at once-- but what I'm doing here is, I'm actually just double clicking in a circle to get that whole loop. I'm deleting that. And then down up here you'll see it actually creates basically, five bodies where there was one. And where that gets awesome is that when you start to delete them, it happens quickly. So just from a Fusion efficiency standpoint, this is a much better way than just going and windowing half of it.

So the next thing we have to do is, we're going to look and see-- because this thing is symmetric. We are still going to delete half of it-- which side is more problematic than the other. So you see, now it converts to a BRep. And you can see that the left side has a couple of extra star points, the right-- yeah, the left side, stage right. We're going to get rid of half of it. And we're going to then, go and troubleshoot the remaining ones. So in this case, I'm going to go through and get rid of the first half. So here it goes a lot faster because just there's a lot less surfaces to eliminate. And now we have-- I'm going to show you two techniques to eliminate the final star point that we need to get rid of. So this one you can see, just down up there. That's what we're going to get rid of.

The first technique is one where we're going to be building out some geometry and we're going to weld it together. The second one is, is we're going to actually remove geometry and then use a patch. So we'll run through two. These two techniques really are all you need to do. And it's-- yeah, so this first one is, I've gone and-- in both techniques, you delete the start point-- and so that's what I'm doing here. So I can see above it how there's two different squares. So now I'm going to actually just use that Alt-Extrude in the sculpting environment to create two new faces. And then I'm going to use an Insert Edge below it. Now I have an equivalent amount of surfaces. OK. We'll just go use weld. And like that, we've got rid of our star point. I think that's pretty clever about going through that.

But wait, there's more, so, another way to get rid of that quad in this workflow, if we delete some of the detail. So just double click on that edge and delete that. Now we really only need one. And we can use create face to get rid of the star point. There's two techniques you can use on much more complex, crazy stuff. And then we can add that geometry back in, if you want to have a-- t-spline's really reward evenly spaced surfaces [INAUDIBLE] so we can put it back in. But we'll see-- see the difference when we convert it, how, whereas before we had this segmented up set of surfaces, and now we have one nice ISO body that goes through it. This is going to pay dividends down the line. And now, from this point, it's just all gravy. We're going to go and we're going to mirror it. We're going to do a bridge to connect things up. And then we're going to create that into an actual solid that we'll then go and start designing from.

So some stuff, just some of these quick little fun things, interesting stuff. When you mirror it-- because you know you have an equivalent amount of sides-- bridge is one of those tools that I really enjoy using because you know it's going to work. That's one of the ways that bridge works. So we can just go in there and connect it up. I kind of like this model, how it turned out anyway, it looks like it's already got a jacket thing going on. We might have just made that instead.

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah, so that's basically the workflow here. That's the workflow it takes to make it so you can design upon it. Remember, I talked about how we also need to make the design so that you can manufacture from it. And so, what we have here is, we still have Dave in all of his infinite athletic glory that isn't going to be transferable to it. So here, I've just got a little bit of cleanup work here on the final end. Let me push this forward. Don't mind the man behind the mask. And what we're going to do now is, we need to remove some of the extra, I guess we'll call it the lumpiness, in there. We won't keep giving him credit for that. And so what we can do within Fusion now is that we can use some of the surface analysis tools to help us identify where certain geometry is that we'd like to remove.

So under the insert-- sorry-- under the inspection options, you can see a couple of different tools that are really useful. One is, in this case, just the curvature. So this shows the absolute curvature. So you're looking for individualized hotspots and things. And the other one is, draft analysis. And the difference between the two is, draft is you actually give it a plane and it'll tell you about the rate of change along the angles. Both these are really useful for figuring out where the differences are. And so the ways we can remove some of this extra geometry, in this case, it's a simplification workflow. I'm going through and I'm removing just some of those different lines. And you see right there, as the colors start to get simpler and they're more uniform, it's getting smoother.

The other stuff we can do is then, using edit form. Just by going and choosing the different nodes you can go and select those points and then just rock your way back and forth. You're not going to be able to get rid of all of them, nor do you want to, because the curvature is what makes your model. But just from those common sense areas where you're like, yeah, let's see if we can-- yeah, we don't want the red, eh, a little bit more. Good enough. And these types of things, it might seem like you're doing a little bit more now but also the difference between a nice surface like this and versus what we originally had can make up as much as an hour difference when you go into ExactFlat. So it's very much worth your time. And it's going to be more accurate too. So you'll have less prototypes. So, yeah. So there is Dave in all its glory. And now we're ready to start designing.

Back to you, Bill.

BILL DIETER: All right. So at this point, we're ready to start drawing on Dave. And we want to create a 3D drawing on his body form or the mannequin. And to do that we're going to use 2D sketches that we're going to project. But what's going to be really fun about this is, we're going to project three sketches, basically simultaneously. And they'll all be connected together. And so, as we update one, the next will update as well.

Do you want to start our--

MIKE AUBREY: Oh, you're ready to jump in now.

BILL DIETER: Yeah, let's--

MIKE AUBREY: Why not? I guess, remember--

BILL DIETER: Yeah, so this is a good example of-- so if you take the time to get rid of your star points and get to a clean model-- and then we're going to build this sketch-- these are all just variations that we did with the existing-- and some of them are just kind of wacky-- but variations that were done just by moving a few control points in our sketches. And you'll see how we do that. And it's a very fast process. So we're going to spend a little time to build this first sketch. But it's completely parametric. And we can go back later and redesign or adjust lines as we see fit. So we've got Dave. And

First thing we're going to do is going to build three sketch planes. And I like, rather than putting it at the world origin, in the middle of Dave, I want to put them outside. Because we're going to start manipulating this around in orthogonal view and stuff, and we want to be able to zoom in and see what we're doing. And we're looking at it in 3D but we're going to be drawing in 2D. So the first thing, we know it's a vest. We're going to have a shoulder strap that's going to go up and over the top. So we want to get-- this is going to be important because it's going to be projected through to the sketch on the back-- so we're going to spend a little time to get this dialed in. And you can see we've got some perpendicular lines coming off that shoulder. We're going to get it positioned just where we want it and that's going to be important to make a really nice smooth connection as we move up and over the shoulder with this projection when we split the face. So the faces are all the-- and most of you guys probably noticed but the faces are all the individual components. And so by eliminating those star points we've saved ourselves a lot of time for when we go to start splitting the faces to create the patterns we want.

So right now we're putting some splines in. And I highly recommend going with just a three point spline, so that you have just smooth, easy control. We can always add points in later if we find we need to add some more curvature or detail but this is just very fast. We're not even worry about where we're putting it because we're going to be able to move this all. Once the entire three drawings are built and they're going to be all connected, we'll be able to start moving things around and seeing what this actually looks like in 3D. So on the side that front panel will be one of our faces that will get split but we're running the drawing off the edge.

And we're working head on, or on the pure front view. We don't want to be working askew because it will be hard to see what we're landing on. And we also want to add tangency to those-- any line that's going to cross over-- so those little, short, perpendicular lines that we have at the top. We've added tangency from that spline because that's going to make everything flow very smoothly as it comes up and over the shoulder. So in this area we've just projected through those three lines that were very important to us in that first drawing. And we're working on the back plane right now. Those have been projected through. And then we're going to just throw in some rough spline lines again to just start defining what the back of this is going to look like.

And the more time we spend on this, the better just because we want it to be good and clean. You can also see this back panel, or that back face, that will be the face that we're working with. And you're going to see what happens when we project and split that face, those lines will stop. And that's going to allow us to connect to this side sketch. And it's when these three sketches-- and this workflow could be more than three sketches that you're connecting together. We could have actually created a sketch just for the top shoulder if we wanted detail up there as well. So again, throwing in some tangency, constraining those, we'll make some adjustments here.

Now there is a good example that comes up here where we actually moved the line outside of an area that is going to be split. And you'll see that in a second. And that's not a great thing to do. And we actually didn't catch it till later. But the-- I'll just point out when we get to it. So we're going to collect the faces that we want to split. We want to do this head on so that we see what we're splitting through, collecting those projected points. And then we're going to split the face. And I always turn off extend splitting.

And so you can now see that we've projected that 2D sketch onto Dave. And we're now just going to go around to the front and project the front sketch, which is 2D. And it will have now a 3D sketch on the mannequin. And we'll also see in the next shot how smooth it is as it goes up and over the shoulder. It just has a very nice smooth connection. Now going around the side, we want to add some detail in there that we could not have projected through from just a two plane sketch. So we're actually going to use this side sketch. So there you can see how we have just a nice fluid line as it goes up and over the shoulder, which is exactly what we were looking for in that spot.

So this sketch is on the left side of Dave. And the first thing we're going to do is project those lines that were the split faces. And so we've now projected those onto our sketch. And we're now going to put splines connecting those points together. And again, we'll do a three point so that we can have some manipulation. And we'll do a spline at the bottom as well. And so what we're building right now is the base pattern that we're going to work from. We're ultimately going to offset this because we don't want this to be skin tight. So again, throwing in some tangency because we want this to be smooth as it flows around the body.

And at this point, we're ready to split this face. So we'll select the face that we're going to split, which we'll get to the second, and there's our sketch as it's projected. And so having it sitting really far off is actually-- at first it seems awkward-- but it's actually really nice because you can then see what it looks like in 3D. And it's completely out of your way. So we just projected. And you can see how smooth that connection is.

And we're going to turn these sketches back on and we can start moving control points around of those splines. And this is a completely stable line and split. So we've now created something that we're going to go through several iterations of this and-- actually once we built it, we decided that the back line that we created was way too high. And so we just went in, grabbed some points, moved it down, and reran the pattern. And it was, I mean, it was literally minutes to adjust and have a whole new pattern set. So this is using three sketch planes. Again, you could have more than three sketch planes all connected together.

And we're now going to do-- I think we're going to-- yeah, so the adjustments we're doing are on those sketches. And having those sketches setting off, keeps them out of our way. So you can see how everything connects up, just nice tangency as it runs through the body, which is exactly what we're looking for. And so it's all style lines at this point.

MIKE AUBREY: Bill, you wanted to make a point about the lines, the edge of this one. You wanted to make a point here. If it's going to fail--

BILL DIETER: Right, so--

MIKE AUBREY: This little guy right here, when you cross boundaries--

BILL DIETER: So we crossed a boundary that we had not selected as one of our cutting faces. And so we're going to see a notch in our pattern, which, it was so small we didn't even see it. But there's an easy fix is to just go back into that split face and just add that as one of our faces to split, or just stay away from that point completely. Because again, this is textile stuff. There's a certain amount of leniency in some of the things that we can do for this particular type of projects. So we have this very parametric model now that we can just go to town on.