Lesson 2: "In-cube-ation" or "Why a cube is not a cube"
Well, now we did set all these options and read the annoying theory? So let's start to actually model something!
Well, the first problem all TA modelers got to face is: how do I make a simple mesh cube with 6 faces instead of 20?
Well, it sounds easy, and it should be easy to generate that most simple form of the cube - but with Rhino? It isn't made for doing this, so we got to use a few tricks.
Start Rhino with the great new template we made in lesson 1.
- The
"Cube"-button
Left-click: make a NURBS Cube.
Right-click: Opens a menu where you can choose of different simple shapes you can create.
Left-click on the "Cube"-button and move the cursor on one of the viewports. You'll see that your cursor become a kind of crosshair, and there's a small point-like thing hopping around in the middle of the crosshair when you move it. (That's a result of the grid snap option of our template) This is the first point of your cube.
Rhino needs three points of you to make a cube one for the beginning, the next for the opposite corner (length) and one for the height. You'll see that Rhino also tells you what it wants in the command line:
...and also it draws the cube while you drag aroung the points.
This is not the kind of cube we need for TA modelling. It is only a basis we make the mesh-cube out of. As I explained it in the theory lesson A, this NURBS cube consists out of "geometrical data" only while a mesh(polygonal)-cube consists out of six faces, each with four corner points. NURBS is useless for TA.
Select the cube now via clicking on it or draggin a frame around it like if you would select one or more units in TA. It becomes yellow now, showing you that it is the selected object. Now we click on
- The
"Mesh"-button
Left-click: make a polygonal mesh out of a NURBS object.
Right-click: "Explode" a poly mesh into single faces.
Now this little window appears:
This si how detailed your mesh shall be. This might appear as a very silly option for a cube, but you might see that it makes sense for a sphere for example. Would you like it to consists out of ten thousand polygons to make it look rounder, or out of one hundret for better performance?
But when you drag it to the maximum left and click okay you'll see that Rhino doesn't make the cube out of 6 sides but out of 20 triangles or so. Hmmm....so what can we do against that? I think you already guessed it... click on "Detailed Controls"...
Hey! Come back! It isn't as hard as it seems!!! ;)
Modify the options so that it looks like above. You see, I only added a zero to the first two values and checked "jagged seams".
Sorry, I won't explain you all these options, you really don't need to know them. I you want to know what they mean, use the Rhino help... ;)
Now click on OK, and then press Del on you keyboard.
Pressing on okay now with these options forces Rhino to make a wonderful 6-faces cube out of the NURBS cube. But it doesn't replace the nurbs cube, but make a new mesh cube at its position. Because we don't need the nurbs cube anymore now, we can delete it, and because it's still selected we can do that by simply pressing del...
This message:
Should tell you that we succeeded, and you should see something like this now on your screen.
Wow! That was the hardest step of all! And you hopefully did it right... ;)
Now you maybe think you cannot do anything as good as the tank you saw on the main screen with a cube, right? Well, it is made entirely out of cubes. But the cubes were deformed so that the fit together better and form new shapes.
How can we deform this cube now so that you can start making your model out of cool cubes?
-
The "Edit points"-button
Left-click: Show edit points for the selected object(s)..
Right-click: Hide all edit points.
...is the way to go. Select your cube and press the "Edit points" button. Now you see a point appearing at each corner of your cube.
So how many are there....8? Well, would be cool, but it isn't like that. Remember the command line told us that Rhino generated "a mesh with 24 points and 6 polygons/faces"? Can you guess why there are 24 instead of 8? To see if your answer is right, click here.
Now select one or more of these "pseude-points" via dragging a frame around it. Not with a click, okay? Then you can drag & drop it wherever you want it to be, and like that deform your cube.
To make it easy for you to see what you're doing, I'd like to show you the
-
The "Shade"-button
Left-click: Shade currently active viewport..
Right-click: Shade all viewports.
It shades your model while runtime so that it looks really 3d without having you waiting for a picture. Best for looking at shaded models is the perspective viewport. Because when using him, you can turn around the model with holding the right mouse button & dragging, and like that you can see your model from all sides. Have fun.
Here is a pic how your screen could look now... and now make a great model out of tons of cubes and then...
Click here to jump to lesson 3 without the theory crap!
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Words & more:
- Mesh & NURBS-
Explained it Theory lesson 1!
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