I’m hoping for some guidance because I’m hitting a wall and honestly getting pretty frustrated with this project.
Goal:
I’m trying to create a new dashboard by combining:
the rear / mounting geometry of a 1985 Mustang dash, and
the front / visible geometry of a 2015 Mustang dash.
I have 3D scans of both dashes, and they’re already:
cleaned up reasonably well
aligned and laid over each other in the correct position
scaled properly relative to one another
Where I’m stuck:
I’ve tried approaching this using SubD, but I can’t seem to get the geometry to conform the way I expect. Edges don’t flow cleanly from front to back, and I’m struggling to understand whether this is a SubD topology issue, a workflow issue, or simply the wrong tool for the job.
My background is mostly Fusion 360 solid modeling, and I did attempt this there first, but it wasn’t a great fit for blending two organic, scanned shapes like this. That’s why I moved to Rhino — but now I’m unsure which modeling paradigm I should really be using here.
What I’m unsure about:
Should this be a SubD-first workflow, or is this better suited for surface modeling (NetworkSrf / Sweep / BlendSrf)?
Is there a recommended way to reform or re-skin a dash using scans as reference, rather than trying to directly modify the mesh?
Should I be converting parts of the scan to SubD, or keeping the scans purely as reference and rebuilding clean geometry on top?
Is there a known “best practice” workflow in Rhino for automotive interior parts like dashboards?
At this point, I feel like I understand what I want to build, but I’m not confident I’m using the right tools in Rhino to do it.
Any guidance on:
tool choice
overall modeling strategy
or even “you’re fighting the software — do it this way instead”
would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance…I’m very open to changing my approach if it means getting unstuck.
You know that old one, “a picture tells a thousand words”? I guess not many people will be familiar with your two dashboards so will struggle to visualise where the problems lie.
Make it easier for us to help by posting a Rhino file containing your cleaned up scans so we have something to work with.
@jeremy5 Sorry, I should have included some images. I am happy to share the Rhino 3D file but it is way over the 20MB limit. This is the viewports where I have overlapped the two dashboards…keeping the steering wheel center for both of them. From this image you can see that what I am trying to do is to create a new dashboard that looks like the blue dash but has all the mounting structures from the purple dash on the backside. As I stated in my post the end goal is to mount this new dashboard into a 1985 Mustang so that I can update all the interior to look more modern as I already have updated the engine and drive train to a 2015 Mustang.
Some of the issues that I am having is trying to model up the blue dash with SubD, which I thought would be the “tool set” to use for this project. I can define edges, but when I go smooth they dont do what I want, or I cannot figure out how to extrude them without distortion.
How can I upload a 80mb file…even zipped it is 60mb?
The giant AI-generated post with too many bolds and bullet lists is extremely off-putting, BTW.
So this doesn’t really seem like something where SubD is the way to go, they are better for upholstered things but both of those dashes just look like normal (and extremely primitive in the one case) surface modeling.
Reverse Engineering is the hardest and least fun thing in all of 3D, the only smart thing to do is just model this from first principles using the scan as a reference, which can be checked using PointDeviation.
If you have access to something like OneDrive you can store it there and share a link.
Are you looking to create an accurate model for reproduction or just to fabricate suitable mountings? If the latter you can afford to lose a lot of front side detail which could help bring your model size down.
Overall, I am looking to create a new merged dash, the two in the pictures are just references. The purple dash is one that I scanned in, and the blue dash is one that I was given to use as a reference. Ultimately I will 3D print the new dash to use in the car. I am relatively new to R8 and trying to figure out what way is best to create the new dash…and learn a little in the process :).
Overall I need the mounting points and framework on the backside of the purple dash, but to make the front of the dash look like the blue dash. I created a link here: 3DShare.
Hope that this link works, and help understand what I am trying to achieve. I wish I understood more about how to use R8 a bit better…this does not seem to model up to well in Fusion under solid modeling, which is what I am most familiar with…but learning R8 is interesting and looks like it will be a great tool to learn more about… Thanks for all the help.
I’d take some time and locate and model the mounting points 1st, fix those in space and work from them to the desired dash. all you need from the modern dash is the hard mounting points and exterior contact points where they hit the cowl and door cards. then you can hide it and focus on your desired dash model.
a lot of these type of projects is “how to eat the elephant” which is one bite at a time.
my thought process would follow as-
locate hard mounting points, model them and lock them in space.
identify the exterior contact areas (cowl and door cards)
locate ad model any critical mounts and vents (radio, guages, hvac etc)
hide modern dash and model desired dash to fit the hard points.
Many subd parts overlapped (not trimmed or booleaned) and shrinkwrap will be your superheroes here. This job will involve many iterative prints and tons of test fitting and having unmerged “chunks” of subd will allow you to edit and adjust very easily with no remodeling of the shapes.
Shrinkwrap will unify your unmerged but overlapping parts to create files you can easily print.
please update the project as you go… this is a cool one!
I’ve been looking at your dashboard meshes. Personally, I would aim to use NURBS rather than SubD for this task.
I’m not sure how well your project is going to go: I couldn’t identify the mounting points on the 85 dash - hopefully you have the knowledge to get round that hurdle! I would aim to place a plane and a centreline at each point and only work at getting the orientation of those right, rather than try a more extensive reconstruction of the 85 dash.
The 2015 dash seems more problematic. It is a low resolution mesh and I have to question whether you can get the necessary dimensional accuracy from it. Incidentally, it appears to have been added to the REF_2015_DASH layer twice.
As a tip to make it easier to visualise meshes in reverse engineering, I like to run contours through them in the XY, XZ and YZ planes, at 10mm intervals.
