How To: Shoulder Joints in Nomad sculpt for 3D Printing

I made an action figure of an old man Ninja Turtle. He's an old man, he's a Ninja Turtle. It's an action figure, it's articulated. It took a lot of trial and error, as you can see. A lot of people ask me about how I did all of these joints because I did it all by hand in Nomad on the iPad. So, today I'm gonna teach you how to do the shoulder joint.

That joint right there, the shoulder. It is a two-part joint. that consists of a pen and that whatever you would call that. I don't know what you call that.

Is that like a disc? I don't know what you call that, but that's what I'm gonna do. It's also the hip joint on this guy, same joint. This one's

much cleaner and prettier, so I'm gonna use this for examples, but it's not really a great hip joint. Anyway, let's jump to it. I'm gonna teach you how to make this, but first I'm gonna say thanks to all my patrons while I clean up my mess here. The patrons support this channel, they support me, they help keep me inspired to keep doing this stuff, to keep sharing this information, and most importantly,

their contributions help pay for my side project, the controller project, where I make game controllers for people with physical disabilities. Let's get into it.

So if we look at our Ninja Turtle, let's inspect just this joint here. If

you're unfamiliar with Nomad, sorry, I'm going to go a little bit fast. If you

want to learn all the basics, I highly recommend that you check out Southern Graphics, I think is what it's called. Glenn Southern, I think is his name. I'll

put a link to it down below. Great tutorials on Nomad will get you started and will get you navigating. But this is how we're going to look at this.

So I'm going to navigate up here. I'm going to start hiding everything that is not this shoulder. I could go into solo mode, but I actually want two pieces here and I'm not smart enough to be able to do all of that intelligently. Whoops.

intelligently. Whoops.

So shoulder, there it is. So we can hide everything else.

And now we just have our shoulder. We can see here our shoulder is two pieces. Now we're going to ignore this piece down here even though by the time

pieces. Now we're going to ignore this piece down here even though by the time we're done you'll know how to make that two more or less. Actually this is really messy so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch to the thigh joint. So let's bring that back in hip and

thigh joint. So let's bring that back in hip and leg and let's come down here and look at this. So this is much much cleaner. Let me hide the other ones.

cleaner. Let me hide the other ones.

shoulder and the shoulder pin are hidden and now we have the leg and the hip. Okay, so we can see here we have these two pieces that interlock together and it looks complicated but it's really not. Really the the most difficult part of this is that you are going to

not. Really the the most difficult part of this is that you are going to have to be making lots of copies of things and trying to keep them straight in your mind as to what they are, but here are, as I said, the major components. You have this piece here, which rotates,

major components. You have this piece here, which rotates, and then this outer piece, which fits around it, and this is all a ball that fits into a socket here. So what we have to create are the holes for everything to fit in that are precisely fit, the shape that's going to fit

into those holes, and this division here, okay? So let's do this with something simple like a square, a block. So here we can see this is the same thing, but it's kind of loose and wiggly. But this is the same thing. This central piece, an outer piece that connects to it, a hole

that fits tight so it fits together. So let's make this in Nomad. All right, we'll go to a new scene here.

in Nomad. All right, we'll go to a new scene here.

Now in Nomad, one of the important things to remember is that your units are in millimeters. So we need to start with something that is a decent size if

in millimeters. So we need to start with something that is a decent size if you're going to be 3D printing this in the first place. Let's delete this sphere and let's add a box. And when we come down here to the size, right now it's one millimeter on all sides. That is nowhere near big enough. Let's do

25 millimeters on all sides and then zoom out. This is really large for Nomad, so it's admittedly kind of confused. So now we have a box. I'm going to validate this. If I go to my settings here and look at wireframe, you can see this is a pretty dense

box. I didn't specify anything on it. I probably should have. This is too dense,

box. I didn't specify anything on it. I probably should have. This is too dense, actually, and it will probably crash Nomad. But if it does, I will start over.

reshoot all this and pretend that I didn't even screw up. But look how dense that is. That should work just fine. We'll find out. So you're going to need

that is. That should work just fine. We'll find out. So you're going to need a box. That's our shoulder. We're going to need a sphere to determine this here

a box. That's our shoulder. We're going to need a sphere to determine this here as well as this shape here. So let's create a sphere.

We can see here that the sphere radius is a half a millimeter.

Let's just start. Let's go to 20 millimeters. Oh, Alright, so that's a huge sphere. We're going to shrink that down and let's look at this.

Does that look about right? I don't know, we're eyeballing it. This isn't CAD, we're not being exact. The fact is there's no specific exact amount that this has to be nestled in. If we look at the shoulder here we can see there's barely any ball there to it, but the hip there's a lot more. Bear in mind the deeper you sink in the less mobility you're going to have on your pivot

here. So you can see this one here is only about a third of the

here. So you can see this one here is only about a third of the way in. So it can really flex and move. So

way in. So it can really flex and move. So

this is fine. That looks good. So we will go ahead and validate that. I'm going to turn off wireframe because it's ugly and we can go back to this pretty stuff here. Now here's where things are going to start getting confusing. We know we need to cut a hole for this, so we're going to take this sphere and I'm going to rename this as Cutter

just so I can keep tabs on it and I'm going to duplicate it. Okay,

so one's Cutter, the new one is going to be Shoulder.

Okay, let's go ahead and hide the shoulder and just look at the Cutter for now. Now those are identical, they have to stay identical. I want this to be

now. Now those are identical, they have to stay identical. I want this to be a tight fit like this leg, so I am not gonna do any size differences.

See how this is not flopping around, it's nice and tight? If you want this, don't scale these at all. If you want it loose like this, what you would do is you would scale this cutter up by a tiny amount. It's very difficult to measure in Nomad. It is possible by scrolling to this measure tool right here and hitting two points, but it's view dependent. It's not perfect

and I hate it, so let's not do it. Okay, so we're gonna leave it alone. What we have now is the box and the cutter visible and the shoulder

alone. What we have now is the box and the cutter visible and the shoulder is hidden and not selected. So we're gonna cut a hole in this box using that cutter. How we do that is we select the box, we select the cutter,

that cutter. How we do that is we select the box, we select the cutter, we hide the cutter. See how that looks? Cutter is hidden, box is visible, and we're gonna do a voxel merge. This number here determines the resolution of the voxel merge. You can see, you can adjust it here. For what we're doing here, I

merge. You can see, you can adjust it here. For what we're doing here, I don't need this very high resolution, but what I do need is keep sharp edges.

I don't want those edges to be all rounded over and funky. So let's hit voxel merge and see what happens. It's going to think and boom. We now have a hole the size of that sphere. Just out of curiosity, let's load our shoulder in. Oh, look at that. It fits perfect. Beautiful. We love it. We love to

in. Oh, look at that. It fits perfect. Beautiful. We love it. We love to see it. Okay. Now, just FYI, let's hide that

see it. Okay. Now, just FYI, let's hide that shoulder again. You can go through and do things like

shoulder again. You can go through and do things like smooth your edges here because this is going to be nasty. And it won't hurt anything because it's relaxing outwards. However, if you were to be drawing in clay and you went across there, you would screw up and you went across

there, you would screw up your ball joint. It wouldn't fit right anymore. So you

gotta be careful and you gotta do this pretty much at the end of your sculpt or close to it. After this point, you don't wanna be screwing with it.

Okay, we've cut a hole in it. Now what we have to do is we have to make the cut in that sphere to make it into an actual joint itself. So let's bring our sphere back. And let's go to our left view. Now here's a tip whenever

you're going to be doing these cuts. You go to your left view, you go to your camera. Sorry, maybe not your camera. There it is, your camera, and you choose orthographic. You want orthographic right here because if you do

choose orthographic. You want orthographic right here because if you do perspective, it warps it by perspective. Orthographic makes it straight on.

I might have that backwards, but it looks right, so I think I have it right. Anyway, what we're going to do is we're going to cut this sphere. Believe

right. Anyway, what we're going to do is we're going to cut this sphere. Believe

it or not, I did this whole thing by eye using the trim tool. What

I tended to do was to make a duplicate just in case I screwed it up and I hide it. So I've got this shoulder selected here, the duplicate's hidden.

With the shoulder selected, I'm going to choose the split tool. I'm going to come over here to line and I'm just going to choose about a third of it and I'm going to try to make that line vertical parallel. to this square. And

then I'm going to do the same thing over here. Whoops, I gotta select this one and now do it. Now you might be asking what if you screw up and you don't get those precise enough that this is going to roll smoothly. I did it by eye for this whole thing and it worked. You just,

smoothly. I did it by eye for this whole thing and it worked. You just,

as long as it's close enough that it looks pretty. Whoops, we select view to get off of that so we can look around. So now we have three separate objects. Oh, it's going to auto save here. I'm just going to say, okay.

objects. Oh, it's going to auto save here. I'm just going to say, okay.

Yes. Okay. All right. So now we have three separate objects and we want to combine. Come on now. Let's go to a different tool.

combine. Come on now. Let's go to a different tool.

Let's combine these outer two pieces that are labeled shoulder.

We're going to combine those just doing, well, we could do a voxel merge or a simple merge, or we could leave them alone. We'll do a simple merge for now. And then this middle one I'm going to call joint.

now. And then this middle one I'm going to call joint.

Now this actually is going to serve another purpose here in a moment. So

let's make the rest of this shoulder here. We're going to make, we need this part here. We're going to make a box.

part here. We're going to make a box.

or cylinder. Let's do a cylinder just to mix things up. You can put in a size or you could just eyeball it, scale it up, whatever.

That's too big, right? So let's scale it down. Yeah. All right.

So pretty. So there's our bicep, if you will.

And what we're going to do is we're going to join this with those two outer pieces. Let's validate that. Let's take this and connect it to our shoulder.

outer pieces. Let's validate that. Let's take this and connect it to our shoulder.

And let's do a voxel merge with sharp stuff selected. Or you know what? It really doesn't matter the order that you do this, but I kind of want to make the cutout in that cylinder first for this central part. this

central part here needs to be able to rotate freely in there. And right now, the inside of that cylinder is overlapping it. It's not going to be able to, if it printed, it would be fused together. So we actually need to cut a hole in this central segment, in this bicep. So what we're going to do is we're going to choose this centerpiece here called the joint. We're going to duplicate that.

You see what I mean about all these duplications? And we're going to stretch it this way, and we're going to stretch it this way without stretching it on this axis. We just want it wider. That is huge. We're going to scale that back a little bit. So you can see that's bigger. Here let me hide the bicep. Yeah this bicep out here, let me hide that. And you can see,

the bicep. Yeah this bicep out here, let me hide that. And you can see, see it's bigger. We want it even just a little bit bigger. This is a duplicated one and that's just to clear space in this bicep. So we have the bicep, And we have this joint piece, which I'm now going to make invisible, so

it's a cutter. And I'm going to do a voxel merge. Your resolution here for this voxel merge, again, is going to be dependent on how much sculpting you have.

Again, if you want to learn about voxel resolution, go watch Glenn's videos.

So I've got the bicep shown, this piece hidden. Going to do a voxel merge.

And now if we look, let's do solo on just this bicep. Hey, look at that. It's got a big chunk cut out of it so that this central piece

that. It's got a big chunk cut out of it so that this central piece can rotate freely. You can see there's a gap there. Oh, it's a beautiful gap.

All right. Now I'm going to combine this and those two outside pieces.

So we have the cylinder and the shoulder. Voxel merge, sharp edges on, whatever resolution you want. For this, it's fairly low. Voxel merge. Now we have that.

This now, this outer part, is complete except for a filament hole, which you could either just drill out by hand or I'll show you how to make that at the end. Okay, time to do the pen that goes inside this socket here. Now, let's hide

this, which is still called the shoulder. Let's keep the joint, but let's hide the box. So we have the joint here. Now that hole is going to be made

box. So we have the joint here. Now that hole is going to be made by a cylinder and a sphere. So let's start with a cylinder.

We will scale this up.

For those of you that do things exact, I know this is torture. Let's go

to the front view. And then let's bring it in here. Let's say

this is too fat. All right.

And I want it fatter actually. Yeah, this one's going to be chunky. All right. So we'll go to the top view here. We'll move it a

chunky. All right. So we'll go to the top view here. We'll move it a little bit so it's at least close to centered. That looks good. All right.

So let's make the sphere that goes on the end. Now you might be wondering why and what the heck and what's going on and I will tell you.

This sphere at the end is the nub. You can barely see it there but there's a nub that allows this to go in. You can see it better on this one. It allows it to go in and snap into place and hold there. You don't want that nub to be bigger than like maybe a millimeter

hold there. You don't want that nub to be bigger than like maybe a millimeter at most on a big one. But you know what? I'm not measuring it. I'm

just looking at it here. So let's look. Let's just look at this sucker here, right? We don't want this to be too

right? We don't want this to be too much bigger than the cylinder. That looks fine to me. So I'm going to combine the cylinder and this sphere. We'll do a voxel merge, keep sharp edges.

This is now one piece. And this is what's going to determine both the hole in here and the pin here. So we need to make a copy of it.

Again, making tons of copies of everything. So let's make a copy of this.

Boom. Let's call this one Cutter.

And let's select it and then let's hide the one with no name. And then

let's bring our box back. because we're going to just go ahead and cut this into our box and unhide that. Okay. Now, just so you can see what's going on, I'm going to hide this joint. Okay. So you can see here that cylinder is in there.

joint. Okay. So you can see here that cylinder is in there.

It is selected. I'm going to hide it so that it will cut. I'm going

to turn this resolution up a little bit. I try not to do anything under like 140, 150. There's no reason for that. And then I do a voxel merge. And then what we can see here is that it is cut in there

merge. And then what we can see here is that it is cut in there and we have that nice ridge for it to grab onto. But now we need to make the pin itself. So let's go back to our shoulder. Let's hide our box. and oh not our shoulder sorry our joint

box. and oh not our shoulder sorry our joint so we're going to hide our box so here's our joint all lonely we need to go to the cylinder that was a duplicate okay this is going to become our pin oh whoops i

messed up see that That shouldn't have been there. That's going to mess things up a little bit. When you do this, be sure to check and make sure you're not doing that. Make sure it's centered. But for the sake of this video, we're going to pretend that didn't happen. It's actually not that big of a problem whenever it comes down to it. Actually, I'll show you how to fix that right now,

just for this example. Since we know that that will catch and get in the way, we can just go to flatten here, make our brush bigger, and just kind of there. Now it won't catch. It's not pretty, but it won't catch. Alright, so

of there. Now it won't catch. It's not pretty, but it won't catch. Alright, so

to cut this sucker so that it's the right shape, flat on the sides so you can print it easily, and then a cutout in the middle for flex and stress relief. That's, again, making more stuff. We're going to make a box, and we're going to size it up,

and we're going to get oh so scientific about this. We're going to move it over. And we are going to scale

over. And we are going to scale it. And we are going to try to get it lined up with the side

it. And we are going to try to get it lined up with the side of our model over here. There's so many different ways you could do this. This

is just the way that works fastest for me. So this looks like it's going to work if I make it taller. What we're going to do is we're going to use this to cut the side off. But before we do it, we're going to duplicate it. And we're going to move the duplicate over to the other side. All right, let's look at the top here and see

if we've got this lined up. Man, I got that circle way off center, that sphere. I mean, OK, so now we've got these two boxes here. All we've got

sphere. I mean, OK, so now we've got these two boxes here. All we've got to do is we've got to hide these two boxes, select them, and select our cylinder and do a voxel merge, and it'll cut the sides off.

Just like everything else we've been doing. Let me just get a top view here so you can see it. And we've got again, we've got these boxes selected and hidden, the cylinder selected, voxel merge with keep sharp edges turned on, and blammo.

We're almost there. Except if you jam this in there, there's no flex to it, so it wouldn't fit very well. You'd have to really, really slam it in there, and there's a good chance it would split this outer one. So what we're going to do is we're going to cut relief in it. There's a lot of ways you could do this. If you want it to be really pretty, you could use

another box to cut out the inside. But you know what actually worked really well for me is...

You can get it... Like... Oh my goodness.

Anyway, we'll do it like this. So you get it like this and you go to your trim tool. and you go to lasso and you just go...

Hey look at that, there's stress relief. So if you look here, this one I did super pretty. I actually used a box and a cylinder to make it so pretty. This one I just did that lasso tool and it works

pretty. This one I just did that lasso tool and it works perfectly. So we're almost done. This and this now need to be joined. The pin

perfectly. So we're almost done. This and this now need to be joined. The pin

and this joint need to be joined together. We're going to do a voxel merge.

And now we have this one, whoops, let's get off of trim here so I'm not cutting it up anymore. Now we have this beautiful single piece. We are

almost totally completed, folks. All that's left now is the hole for the filament.

Again, you could drill this by hand, and there's a good chance if you screw this up later, you're going to be drilling it anyway. As a point of fact, I did all of these. I made the holes perfect for filament, but then I went back in and I sculpted some stuff and it warped the hole. So I

had to find a drill bit that was slightly smaller than filament and just wiggle it around in there until it worked. So, you know, whatever. Choose your battles. So

let's bring back our shoulder. So this is what we're working with here. And I'll

show you how I got a filament hole lined up perfectly with the center. That's

the remaining piece. of this

puzzle. Duplicate of a sphere here, let me hide, let me just go here. We want to cut a hole directly through the center of this sphere. What we do is we create our cylinder that's going to be our filament. We make the radius one millimeter, which makes it a two

millimeter diameter. We make our length something long that we know will

millimeter diameter. We make our length something long that we know will stick out both ends, right? and we want to line it up to this sphere.

If any of you all know a more automated way, let me know. But right

now what I can do is I can tap back and forth and I can see by looking at the gizmo that this needs to move over a little bit. That's pretty

close. Now let's look at it from the front.

So it needs to move down. That's pretty

close. We can go at an angle. You see how the gizmo, I'm looking right here at this line on the gizmo. And you can see how it stays.

Oh, looks like I need to move over a little bit.

Now remember you're going to have to duplicate this, which I'm going to call filament.

Because we have two pieces we need to cut. Okay? So

first let's cut this bicep by going here, selecting one of the filaments and hiding it. So this is the shoulder, that's a filament. These are the only two things selected. We're going to do a voxel merge with the filament hidden.

And now we have a hole, but it doesn't go through this middle one. We're

going to select it, select this other filament and hide it.

Oh no, sorry, they do rename themselves as you go. So did I not duplicate that? I didn't. Let's undo.

duplicate that? I didn't. Let's undo.

find our filament here and let's duplicate it. Now let's try this again. We're going

to select our central joint and do a voxel merge with the filament hidden. And we're going to select our bicep and a hidden filament and do a voxel merge. And now we have our completed joint. You can see all the way through. That's where your filament is going to

joint. You can see all the way through. That's where your filament is going to go. Even though I did not allow for any kind of

go. Even though I did not allow for any kind of tolerance here, it's going to fit. This was designed with no tolerance whatsoever and it fits nice and snug and holds in place. Now if you wanted to have it loose like this and floppy, then you would have scaled, and you still

can, scale this part in on this axis here. Just a tiny bit. Just an itty bitty bit. Like don't go like that. Do just a fraction.

bit. Just an itty bitty bit. Like don't go like that. Do just a fraction.

Now if you want to measure it, I'll show you how that's done. You go

to the measure tool, go to your top, go to one of your side views so you're not all over the place. Then go to your measure tool and go boop boop two places. That's .0149. You can see how useless this is when you're talking about like, you know, there's a half a millimeter there. .42 millimeters.

But the problem is like if your view is off a little bit and you think you're measuring here to here that says 0.5 millimeters but then if we rotate this around we see that I was actually just measuring. Wow it actually did work.

The point is it doesn't always measure it measures by the view so it doesn't always measure exactly what you're expecting. Yeah there's a good one. I tried to measure directly across but instead if we look here it's actually five millimeters into that hole that it measured. So I gave up on measuring stuff. Anyway, that is it. That

is our entire joint. Let's bring our box back and unhide it. And there we go. There is our entire joint. Ready to go.

go. There is our entire joint. Ready to go.

Now, if you want to test ranges of motion, you're going to need to move your pivot around. So do things like select your piece, hit pivot over here. Oh,

sorry. Select your piece, go to Gizmo here, hit pivot, and then you can just move your pivot to that hole where the filament is. Right?

And then go back to auto or hit pivot again and now you can test your range of motion. And then you can do things like sculpt to, you know, open up your range of motion. But that right there is how it's done. Hey

there. If you like this and you want more tutorials, be sure to subscribe and if you want to support me, go to my Patreon and maybe you'll get videos ahead of time or exclusive files or some junk like that. But mostly you'll just help me send game controllers to people with physical disabilities. Okay, thanks. Bye. Love you. Bye.