This month, Darren Chilton will guide Evolve users through some animation basics. Animation in Evolve is based on a simple but powerful technique called Key Framing. Darren explains the attributes that you can animate for an object (translation, rotation and scale) and for the camera (position and target) with an easy to follow example.
Click on the video below to see these tips & tricks in action.
This month’s Tips & Tricks video provides insight into the pixel mapping process, including:
Click on the video below to see these tips in action.
In this month’s Tips & Tricks, Darren Chilton provides techniques for creating models that have symmetrical elements including:
Click on the video below to see these tips & tricks in action.
In this month’s edition of the solidThinking Tips & Tricks series, Darren Chilton highlights using 2D images as references to create 3D models. Please click on the video below to see the following tips in action:
With the release of solidThinking 8.5 six essentials videos, which can help users get up and running quickly and independently, are now available in ten languages. Supported languages include English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.
A new demo showing how to model an electric razor has been added to solidThinking’s YouTube Channel.
See how you can quickly model the razor, change details and perfect its design in complete freedom thanks to solidThinking’s unique ConstructionTree technology.
In some cases, the Round modeling tool does not highlight some of the edges that you would like to round. This can happen because there are gaps. As a consequence, you cannot apply radii to these edges.
To verify the presence of gaps, click the ESC key to close the Round tool and use the Tolerance Check tool (see image below).
In order to solve the problem, the best way is to first verify the geometry and then close the gaps by taking advantage of the ConstructionTree™ structure that will allow you to apply changes to the model and update the geometry.
In some cases, you may also prefer to perform the operation without fixing the geometry.
To do this, choose the Round tool, then select the object. Now, use the CTRL+ENTER shortcut to close the tool without adding radii (They will be added later). Increase the Sew Tolerance as displayed in the image below.
You should increase the Sew Tolerance by small increments until you get the following panel (see image below). This panel informs you that the number of edges has changed. Just click OK.
Now, by using a bigger value for Sew Tolerance (see image below), all the edges are highlighted.
At this point, you can click the Insert Radius checkbox to add the radius you need.
Remember that in order to perform the operation, you will need to apply radii to ALL the edges that had gaps (they were displayed in yellow when you used the Tolerance Check). Of course, you can also add any other radius that you need.
A new demo showing how to model a spray bottle is available. See how solidThinking lets you explore any possible design alternative in real time.
You can find the real time version of the demo, useful for learning, at the Demos page of the solidThinking Web site.
An accelerated version of the demo is avaialble at www.youtube.com/solidthinking.
The Translate, Rotate, and Scale tools have no Console prompts or ‘creation phase’ so the Tool panel is immediately active. Like all basic transform tools, we can either enter exact values in the Tool Panel or simply click-and-drag in the workspace to interactively perform the action.
The input boxes for the Translate, Rotate, and Scale tools will accept numeric input at any time until the action is closed.
This means that you can ‘preview’ the effects of the value you entered and still enter another value to replace the previous one. These values are not cumulative, so entering a value of -3 and then a value of -1 will not equal -4.
The Bounding box fitting scales a given object to fit it into a user-defined box. Scaling transformation can be non uniform so that you can define exact dimensions for each direction (X, Y, Z) of the box. Here is how you use it:
1. Select an object.
2. Click the Bounding Box Fitting icon (If the object has a Construction Tree, the program displays an alert message informing the user that a copy of the object will be created).
3. Pick and drag a HotSpot to change the dimension of your bounding box or insert the new value in the Width field in the Modeling Tool panel.
You can uncheck the Constrain Proportions in the Modeling Tool Panel in order to set different values in Width, Depth and Height. You can also set a custom scaling center.
Note: Keep in mind that you cannot use the Bounding box fitting with primitives or with objects that are involved in a construction history without collapsing them. If an object is not collapsed you can edit its parameter inside the modeling tool panel as usual.
