USA Deluxe Blender Stratocaster Custom Build
I built this model in Blender as close as I could get it to my original USA Deluxe Fender Stratocaster which I customised. It's purpose is as a prop in my studio scene, some of which is visible in the background. I might possibly animate it within this scene. I have yet to write that part of the story.
Many of the models and animations in this portfolio are part of the same production. It is possible I might at some point have the robot arm playing the guitar. We shall see!
I used Blender 3.5 as my entire scene was built in that and (as you will know if you use Blender) later versions are likely to break various aspects of the texturing, rigging or animation. I used a few Poliigon textures, but mostly all textures are made in Blender itself. It was all rendered in Cycles at 5120 x 2880 using 512 samples on my RTX 5090.
The soundtrack is my cover of a solo from a well known Pink Floyd track, created in Cubase Pro 11 and using the actual guitar featured for the rhythm channel and lead solo.
The full animation compressed to upload here.
The rigging and animation of the tuners, including having the wound string being turned around the capstan, took some innovative gerrymandering and used mainly drivers in some unorthodox ways.
Here's a loop of the Khahler Trem in action. This is built exactly to scale using engineer's calipers to measure of the real instrument. It's mechanically pretty complex and it also took some doing to replicate the stretching and bending around the cam.
Here's a full shot of the beast.
The pickup surrounds are originally off an Ibanez, except for the single pickup one which I had to have specially made. I just love how they look.
The headstock is gorgeous, with full on chrome inlay into the paint for the graphics. Locking tuners and the roller nut make the tuning very stable.