Create accurate digital
tape drawings easily within Alias by using the automatic shape
creation option as curves are created. This How-To provides the
basic workflow for creating a front view tape drawing.
Using Automatic shape creation
options
- Choose Preferences > Workflows > Paint to turn on 2D paint menus.
- In the Global Auto-shape section
of the Paint Control Panel, choose Image(outline) from
the Type menu. The system will
now draw shape outlines every time a new curve is created.
- In the Shape Outline options
section in the Paint Control Panel, set the Style to Solid Brush, Opacity to 1,
and Width to 4.
- Open the Curves > Blend Curve Toolboxand
choose the Keypoint Curve Tools > Lines > Line tool. Place the first point
at 0,0,0 and the second point at 0, 90 cm, 0. Notice how the shape
is automatically drawn on the left side of the construction plane.
Using the object information window you can adjust the line length
to accurately define half the width of the car.
- Select the Line tool
again and draw another line to define the height: 0, 0, 112 cm.
NoteYou
might need to zoom out your view to see the whole lines.
- Select both lines and adjust the width
of the shape outline. I.e make these construction lines 2 pixels
wide (Width set to 2.0). This will
also modify the width of future construction lines that you place
in the image.
- Open the Blend curve toolbox from
the Curves palette, choose Blend
curve create and use curve snap to snap the first point
to the top of the vertical line you created earlier. Continue drawing
the windscreen profile. Notice that as you draw on one side of the
symmetry plane, the system draws the curve and the shape on the
other side.
- Use the blend curve tools to edit the
curve and add constraints as required. For example, the center point
requires a tangent constraint to ensure the curve is flat across
the line of symmetry.
- Continue to create additional blend
curves to define the front view. Make sure you use curve snap for
curves that intersect so a curve relationship/constraint is automatically created.
- Now select the curves you want to make
wider and modify the Shape Outline Width.
- You may also want to remove the outline
from the first horizontal & vertical lines. These were created
as guide curves to establish the correct width & height of the
car.
- At this point you may wish to evaluate
the quality of each curve created using the Alias curve curvature
tools.
- At any time you can toggle off the geometry
curves using F12 or WindowDisplay > Toggles > Model .
- If you are working in an environment
with 1:1 projection capabilities or you want to print your tape
drawing at a larger scale, you may want to increase the resolution
of the canvas plane. All shape curves will automatically update
when the canvas plane resolution is changed.
- Our canvas plane resolution is 1109 *
770 pixels, which if printed at 150ppi would result in an image
printed on paper of approximately 7” x 5” without any image scaling.
Printing
Lets assume you now want
to print your tape drawing at ¼ scale. A number of options need
to be set before your can make a successful print.
- First choose File > Print Setup and on the Output tab,
choose a printer; in this example, we will print on a large format
roll feed printer using the output postscript print language.
- Next, on the Paper tab,
select the paper type, paper standard, paper size and orientation.
- In this example, we require the typical
title box and engineering information in the bottom left corner
of the paper.
- Next, we define what views we want to
see on the paper. In this example we want to see a single view layout
and we want to specify a specific print scale.
Note the active window
is used by default to create a single view layout.
- Now it’s time to select the print menu
command to open the preview window.
The print preview window
shows dotted line pages. At a scale of 1:1, this image requires
9 pages of A0 size paper.
- Modify the Page Display State in
this preview window to display each page with paper margins. This
option makes it clear to understand what will be printed on each page.
NoteYou
can use standard Alias view modifier keys (
+
+
(Windows) or
+
+
(Mac)) in the preview window
to adjust exactly how the image will be positioned on the paper.
- After considering this image for a bit,
we decide that what we really want is a single piece of paper at
1:4 (25%) scale. In the print setup window Viewing tab,
change the Scale to 1:4.
- See how the Print Preview window has
changed to display a single page.
- Now click the Print button
to print your image.
Adding Simple Texture To
a Tape Drawing
When creating a tape
drawing, designers often add solid color and texture to improve
the appearance of the image. In this example we will use the Make
Shape tool to add this detail.
- Load in your tape drawing file you created
earlier. In our example, the main tape curves have been created
and additional curves that define the wheels, headlights, and grill
detailing have been placed with a thinner line.
At the moment the additional
curve detailing is assigned to the default 3D geometry layer, so
we need to create new symmetry layers and assign the geometry to
them.
- Choose Preferences > Workflows > Modeling to make all modeling tools
available.
- Choose Layers > New to create a new geometry
layer. A geometry layer will be added to the horizontal bar. Double
click the new layer and type a name, for example, Headlights.
- Repeat this step and name the next layer Tires; repeat
again and name the next Grill. The
Grill geometry layer should be the active layer (drawn in yellow).
- Using Pick > Object select the curves that define
the grill detailing and assign them to the Grill layer using the
Grill layer drop-down menu.
- Using the same menu, turn on Symmetry for
this layer and notice how the curves are reflected across the center
line.
- Choose Paint > Shape > Make Image Shape and select the curves that
define the center grill. Note you need only select one half of the
grill curves.
- Click the Accept button.
After the curves are accepted a shape object is created and the
paint parameters adjusted.
- In this example, we want to create a
small vertical grill effect, so click on the Map button
next to RGB Color in the Shape
Fill options of the Paint Panel
to open the Shape Texture window.
- Click the Bulge texture.
- Adjust the Uscale & Vscale bulge
parameters .
- Repeat this process for the outer grill
detailing.
- Follow the same procedure to assign the Grid texture
to the tires. Set the Vwidth to
0 so the grid displays as vertical lines.
Congratulations! You’ve
now completed a tape drawing using Alias.