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 section of the Control Panel, choose from the menu. The system will now draw shape outlines every time a new curve is created.
- In the options section in the Control Panel, set the to , to , and to .
- 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 tool again and draw another line to define the height: 0, 0, 112 cm.
Note
You 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 ( set to 2.0). This will also modify the width of future construction lines that you place in the image.
- Open the from the palette, choose 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 .
- 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 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 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 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 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.
- 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 tab, change the to .
- See how the Print Preview window has changed to display a single page.
- Now click the 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, .
- Repeat this step and name the next layer repeat again and name the next . 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 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 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 button next to in the options of the Panel to open the window.
- Click the texture.
- Adjust the & bulge parameters .
- Repeat this process for the outer grill detailing.
- Follow the same procedure to assign the texture to the tires. Set the to 0 so the grid displays as vertical lines.
Congratulations! You’ve now completed a tape drawing using Alias.