Black Beauty

If you told me that I could have one guitar and only one guitar for the rest of my days you’d never get an answer. There’s simply too many that I could list off. The Velvet by Magneto guitars has a certain classic distinguished look and feel to it. Godin’s latest iteration on the Montreal Premier line has had me interested for a long time. Of course every guitar player has dreamed of having a Gretsch White Falcon (if not to play, then just to own) and as a Brian Setzer fan I’d sure like to have one to jam out on.

If instead you asked me which guitar I think has the most striking design, I’d have to go with the Les Paul Custom, better known as a Black Beauty. Many months in high school as a music gear head were dedicated to being all together way too absorbed with this guitar.

When I was first picking up blender I started where most people do, the infamous donut render by BlenderGuru. I really like this tutorial, it’s able to cover a lot of ground in a short period. I think I did each of the sections in their own dedicated night and had a basic model done within a week.

It’s encouraging, you feel constant progress with the tools in front of you and get familiarity quickly. But that feeling of encouragement can lead to ambition, and ambition left unchecked can lead to obsession. I didn’t plan to take on an absurdly difficult project as my first non-tutorial model, but somehow this one donut made me think I was ready to do something crazy.

It started simple enough. Just play around with some materials, it’ll be a nice first step into this project and being able to make things look nice and polished as I went was going to be a great way to keep on track. So what did I need. Well, the two basics were going to be the gold for the hardware and the glossy black paint for the majority of the model. Oh yeah, I guess the neck and body can have some cream coloured bindings sometimes, so let us add that without thinking how on earth you’ll accomplish this topological problem. Then there’s the pearloid inlays, the black plastic, and oh yeah the frets are a steelish silver colour. Great, we’ve got everything we need. The trap is set, time to take on a fight way above my weight class.

Starting off with the project was mostly research, finding a bunch of good reference pieces to use and base my model off of. In my head I was going to make the most accurate model of a Les Paul as I could. To some degree, that’s true, I did finish with the best I could do. But it would be no where near where I wanted.

My first component was the tuning peg. Pretty auspicious a choice at first glance. It’s pretty boxy and mostly covered by the headstock so there’s a fair bit of wiggle room to get things hidden on this model.

And then the new problems started coming in. The bevel of the back of the tuning peg not shown in either of the views provided. The irregular shape of the handle that was also concave. The need to have a smooth peg for the string to wind around, but also having to manage the mesh to punch a smooth hole into that peg. I feel like there’s easy ways to accomplish these tasks, but none of them were covered in the donut…none of them where covered in the donut.

I’d get through eventually and thankfully move on to two much easier components next. The bridge and saddle for the strings. Despite the small parts, they were relatively much easier than the tuning peg. All in all, just a couple cubes and cylinders needing to be mixed together creatively. And made even easier with the fact that these components were symmetrical.

I think between these three parts I had spent about a week. I was making good progress, heck I even got to playing with multi axis rotations to do this fun little picture now that I had more than one object to render with.

Week 2 in contrast would just be tedious.

I am not a man who cares’ much for classics. As a player, I own a Schecter C1-EA from 2003 (a hollowbody super strat with built in Piezo) that I’ve swapped out the humbuckers for some Lollar made P90s fitted for humbucker slots, not because I felt they would be the best sound possible but just because I never had P90s and this guitar was available for a swap. I say all this because I still went with the classic JB and Jazz combo when modelling. Seymour Duncan however doesn’t do that good of a job when it comes to their blueprints I find. The measurements shown above I’m sure map on to their production equipment. The sketches themselves however I couldn’t get to match. It’s not like things are massively off, but when I wanted to get this guitar to be as accurate as I could, a couple millimeters translated into actual hours of slightly scaling the pickups up and down by small percentages. At a certain point, this was the part of the model that made me realize why some directors will say they film how something feels not how it is. 100% accuracy isn’t always what we want to see, and I’ll say I got damn close with these pickups, but in the end they look better than they would actually function if fit into a guitar.

Week 3 is probably where I felt like I spent the most amount of time. The most fun too to be honest. The fretboard has a compounding radius, usually going from about 12” at the headstock and then to 16” at around the end. The fretboard also gains a bit of width as things get closer to the base of the neck. The back side can have a more constant radius, but will gain that same thickness and has to smoothly translate into both the heel and the headstock. The headstock itself is at a steep angle, I believe mine is 14 degrees. And then there was the binding. I cheated a little bit on this part. Highlight the outer edges of the mesh, duplicated them, separate into a distinct object, recolour and then scale just enough to appear on the outside from all angles. The fretting and inlay work was rather quick to be honest and I think the most fun part was putting my logo on the headstock. Never thought I’d see that in my time.

The final week was the body of the guitar and some of the bits and bobs like the control knobs and the selector switch. This is where I came accept the donut was not enough and I’d have to take on more projects before I tackle something this complex again.

As seen here, I’ve done a slight replication of the viewing angle provided by the Rocksmith game cover to see how my model fared out. The body is flat in the end instead of the traditional Les Paul arch top because I couldn’t figure out that topology to save my life right now, but I’m quite pleased.

In the end I got something I am still quite proud to present. Not 100% thrilled, but that’s just me wanting to be perfect on my first try. Still though, happy enough, nothing on this model was done from a tutorial, and getting something with this much complexity done as my first real solo attempt has me thinking I can do fun things while I learn instead of being at the whim of what ever tutorials I can find. And so this was the progress on my obsession, creating the guitar I worshiped for years in a digital form that will forever stand as the point I went from being taught to actively learning how to do 3D modelling.