What's up, guys! Do you think details on lures matter? I am talking, eyes, ribs, and little fins on the side. I'm undecided. I know they catch fishermen. I get asked frequently, “how do I add eyes? how do I add ribs? How do I add fins? how do I add scales.” To answer this, adding scales sucks. I decided to put together this video and blog how to. It's an offshoot of the live stream we did a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to condense it down to give you guys pinpoint and accurate information about fishing lure design. The way we do this infusion 360 is pretty much the same for eyes and fins. Let's start!

First, I'm going to use this body I had laying around from a twitch bait I have been working on. I believe this works with anybody's sculpts. As you can see, this is a loft I created on the live stream I did last week. We will create a sketch and choose this plane in the same direction as the face we're working on located in the middle of the lure. We're going to draw our eye. For this demo example, I'm just going to keep it simple.

The Eyes

I'm going to draw a circle that measures 10 millimeters to create a big eye. Click enter. Next, move it to where you want it to be and click finish sketch. Now I have this circle in the middle of my lure. It may not look helpful, but we're going to hit the extrude button. Select that circle. As you can see, the key is the start point; start there and click the object. Now, when I go to pull it out, it starts from right on that edge. If I want to make a poke-out eyeball, I can pull it out to create an indentation. If I had a stick-on eye that I tried to use, I could make a little indentation there quickly. We'll go with a stick-out eyeball today. Let's make it stick two millimeters—it an excellent protocol to write the number down. Afterward, I will hit enter. As soon as I do that, you see, I have this kind of funky eyeball on one side, and my circle has disappeared.

Let's clean up this eyeball. First, let's click that, and we're going to use the fill it command, or I can just hit the f key. I pulled it out two millimeters, so let's pop it back 1.9, and that'll round off that corner. you'll get an excellent roundish eye there. You may be saying, “dude, a lure with one eye on one side doesn't do me much good,” and you are right. Let's spin around to the left side of my lure. Fusion, by default, hides it. If you pull down the sketches tab, click, that eyeball icon will show up again. We can do the same thing. we're going to extrude that eye from this object on this side now. you'll see here my number is negative. That's because it switches on the different sides of this plane. Let's say negative 2 pops it out the same distance, hit the fillet to do 1.9 again, and boom, now we have the same eyeball on both sides of the lure. It's pretty straightforward.

The Fins

We're going to the same thing for some fins here.Create a sketch on this plane. I am going to create some dorsal fins. Once you draw them, the process is the same. Extrude, select that start from the object and go out maybe one point. If you make a mistake, you can always go back down here by right-clicking the edit feature. If you ever see this error here, “could I be created requested size,” all you need to do is go through and keep going down. We can do a 0.8 same error or 0.5 same error. Keep in mind; the 0.1 is useless. 0.3 is a little bit better. Now that we are using 0.3 let's turn our sketch back on do the same thing. Come over to the left side. It's beneficial if you click the box. This way, know everything is completely aligned. Hit extrude from the object. This object will be negative 1.8. We're negative on this side, so I will be holding down to the shift key and hitting my middle mouse button to move 1.8. Fill it, and boom.

There we have it. We have some dorsal fins and some other stuff. I have eyes and a little in, but what if I want to add a fin going across the top? that's pretty easy as well, and again same basic concept. we're going to create a sketch on this plane. Now, remember, this plane is right along these lines here. We will be sketching on that plane. that plane is right on this green axis in the middle of my bait, which is in the middle of my lure. Basically, whatever I add and draw on this plane, it's going to be perfectly centered. Let's go back to my fit point spline and use the project command to project this line into my drawing. What this does is takes this line puts it into my current drawing. You can see how it's purple. That way, when I go to draw my spline, you'll see what will happen. You can zoom in close. When I hit that line, it'll click onto that, and that's how I know I am exactly on that line. Whatever I draw will line up to that line at the exact point. When I go to make my fin, it will be a lot easier to deal with. Let's zoom out a little bit. I'm not going to spend too much time on this because the exact shape is not essential. What is important is the technique. You can see I have a profile here because it's shaded on the inside. That's what I need to extrude. Once I finish the sketch, hit the extrude. It already has that chosen now on the key; we want to change our direction, we want to make it symmetric. You're going to be doubling this distance because you're going to do it symmetrically. One side will be the same as the other, so if I do two millimeters, my fin here ends up being four millimeters thick. The things you want to watch out for see are happening in the back here. You see how it's all funky because it's too thick. That's what you need to keep an eye out for.

I wouldn't probably have made one this long, but we can do this easily. Stay on the right; we're just going to click OK. We want to do a join and click OK. Then we look at it, and you can still see that we're when we get to the back here, we get two a little too skinny. What we can do is come over to my history and edit this sketch. You can drag until you find where you want to be. That's a little bit better, right? Let me finish sketching.

Now, it's still not great, but you get the idea. I would even make it probably 0.5, so it's just 1 millimeter. That's pretty small, but we have a little back here. There you go, there's a fin again. The easiest thing to do is select both sides, add a fillet of 0.2, and that's going to smooth those circuit surfaces out. Now we have fins attached to the body and fins sticking out for the body. Next up, we're going to move two rings. I'm going to take these fins. I don't typically do rings on baits with fins, but you can do them. It would be best if you put them in a slightly different order. I would not do any body fins. You can do a top fin or a sticky hatty fin if you want, but it's best if you keep everything off the body.

The Ribs

Let's back up, and we're going to remove these features here back to just my eyes. Now we're going to do the ribs. Again, the ribs are pretty straightforward. They're just a little bit time-consuming because you have to click on a bunch of stuff over and over again. We're going to create a sketch also on the same side plane and draw a line. Now this line is the alignment of your ribs so you can make them straight up and down. You can make them at angles. You can make them kind of any way you want to go. For this example, let's do some slightly slanted lines just for the fun of it. Now, the key here is my start point I clicked on. It needs to be above the lure's body at the highest point, and the bottom needs to be below the lowest point. Click that to make a line, click the check box, and now we're going to make a rectangular pattern. To create the rectangular design, click the line. Drag it out to where you want them, and let's change our number. This is kind of where the feel of it goes, and that's 36.

You can adjust the number to your liking. I just kind of eyeball it. Pull it out to where you want the last one to be and then change the numbers as we go; click OK. Click finish sketch, so now we need to use a trick that I learned only recently. Please create a new sketch again on the same plane we've been working on. Now, we're going to develop a project to the surface. This is where the magic happens. To project a surface, the first thing we want to do is select the faces. We're going to choose the front of this lure and select the curves. This is going to be all my lines, and the easiest way to determine these is to come to the right of the last line, click and drag to the left. You don't want to drag up here where you get these dots. You don't want to drag down here where you get this body. You just want to make sure you select all the lines, and it will pick them all up. For projection type, you want to do a long vector and project direction. We're going to choose this red axis. If it's done correctly, you'll see red lines going all the way around my lure. Those are our projections or our projected curves, if you will. Click OK and finish the sketch.

You can see my lines are still showing up, so I'm going to turn those off. Now, I have these yellow lines, which are my projections across the body of my bait. I am going to use these to make pipes. Click the pipe command. The first thing I want is a path. I'm going to choose that guy first, and by default, it wants to cut. it's going to cut into the bait, which is a cool effect and kind of anti-ribs. we're going to go back and edit that again. The other things you can change is whether it's a circle, a square, or a triangle. Triangles, in particular, can make cool ribs. we're going to say OK on that one real quick, and as you can see, it gives us this kind of cut. we'll go back and edit that. If I make it a join, it will create a rib-like this; pretty cool looking. I've done a lure with that, and I think it makes a little more noise when running through the water. Today we're going to keep it in a circle. We're going to make sure we have it on join, and then this section size is how big of a round it is. This is totally up to you in the lure you're making. we'll do bigger ones at 1.8. choose our section size, which again is the diameter of the pipe. Make sure it's on join and click OK. Now we have one rib, and you're like, dude, I need more than one rib. Again, we turn our sketch back on because fusion thought we were done with it and click the pipe command.

We're going to select the next curve now. This is where it gets tedious because there's no way that I've been able to find to choose all of these to run a pipe. The nice thing is fusion remembers after you get one in there, which you did last time so if I do a join, click OK; now, when I come to my next pipe, click on the curve. It's going to be the same. it won't remember the first one; it recognizes the second one and then all the ones moving forward. Then I have to click OK. Click pipe. Click the curve and hit the enter key. Click the pipe, click the curve, and hit the enter key. It isn't enjoyable. It should be able to figure this out itself. Create a little cut-out tail section. I can move this to cut, and you may get this error, “the sweep would create an illegal surface.” what you need to do is reduce your diameter or your section size until you get one that works. Once you choose the one you prefer, we cut it. Instead of a sticking-out rib, we have a little cut into the tail, which hopefully would give you a bit more action.

I hope you found that useful. here's that video I was talking about where the guy does the scales. Again, you can see how tedious it is. I'm not too fond of it. You can also find my other lure design videos here. Come back for more see you guys soon—tight lines.