Modeler's Design Environment
The Workspace tutorial provides tips for customizing Modeler's workspace and introduces you to the available tools, menus, and palettes. You are presented with a four window design environment that contains palettes strategically placed to be readily accessible, yet provide maximum workspace.
At the top of the screen, you will find the Tool Info palette. This palette provides you with the ability to set exact numeric values for the currently selected tool. As an example, the Pyramid 3D tool., shown below, lets you specify the number of sides as well as the height, width, and depth by clicking in the set box at the left of the dimension and typing in the numeric entry boxes at the right of the dimension. In the example below, the pyramid has 8 sides and a height set at 1.5 with the width and depth allowed to change with the movement of the cursor.
At the left of the workspace, you have the Tool and Snap palettes with the Pyramid tool highlighted because it is the currently selected tool. The Snap palette lets you set Free, Grid, Vertex, On Contour, Marker, Midpoint, Center, and Intersection locking options to help you in setting vertices. At the right, you have the Group palette. This shows a single defined object, the pyramid. To take up less space, this palette can also be rolled up like a window shade. You do this by clicking in the scroll box at the top-right of the palette. Currently invisible, but displayable by selecting Palettes under the Windows menu is the Statistics palette. This is used for calculating the volume, surface area, and surface volume of the thickness of an object.
At the very bottom, You have the Status Line palette. This palette, shown below, provides prompts for the currently selected tool and as such can be invaluable in letting you know what is expected for the tool you just selected and saving you a trip to the manual. To the right of the palette, the current position of the cursor is displayed. This can also be used for direct numeric entry of a coordinate position.
At the bottom of each view, four window controls let you manipulate the size of the displayed objects within the window and change the size of the window. Clicking on the left-most button, the Fit-to-Window button, cause the displayed object to re-size to fill the window. To the right is the Grow, Shrink, and Resize Window buttons
Customizing Modeler's Work Space
Open the application named Modeler found in the Presenter 3D folder. The first thing to do is to customize your workspace.
- Go to the Edit menu and select Preferences.
NOTE: The Drawing preferences shown above let you select the decimal place accuracy, units and cursor types.
- Click on the icon on the left of the Preferences box that says Screen. On the right hand side where it says Vertex Options, select the one that says 5 Pixels.
- Click on the icon to the left of the Preferences' scrolling bar and select Drawing. On the top right are your Scale Options.
- For Decimal Places: select 1.000.
- For Units: select Decimal Feet.
- Use the scroll bar on the left of the Preferences to scroll down to Colors just below the Grid icon.
- Click on the Colors icon and for Background.
- Click on the gray rectangle to bring up the color picker.
- For Background Color, use the slider and click in the color wheel to select your background color. White seems to work the best.
- Click OK to exit the color picker.
- Back in the Preferences box, click the Save Preferences button to save and exit the Preferences.
- Look at the small bottom icons underneath the top right window labeled Untitled-1:Angled. Click the small button under this window that has a red T. This will turn off the grid in that window. The T, F and R buttons turn on the top, front and right grids.
NOTE: The button at the left is used for turning the lights on. To the right of the R button are the wireframe and smooth shaded display buttons. Next is the snapshot camera button and the four window control buttons.
- To make more room, close the very bottom narrow horizontal strip by clicking in the small left square.
- Go to the Windows menu and select Clean Up Windows. This will enlarge and spread the windows out to use all the available space.
- Go to the Options menu and select Show Rulers. Hiding the rulers will give you more modeling space. You can always go back later and select Show Rulers when you need to measure your objects.
The Tool Palette
Illustration 1 shows the various tools available in Modeler. These names will be used to identify the various tools as you work through this tutorial.
NOTE: The tools are arranged by function.
- The first row shows the Object Selection tools.
- The second, the Viewing tools.
- The third and fourth rows have the Object Manipulation tools.
- Rows 5, 6 and 7 contain the Object Creation tools.
- The 3-D Operations tools are located in rows 8, 9, 10 and 11.
- Just below are the Color Swatches, Fill, and Drag Options buttons>.
Illustration 1 - The Modeler tool palette
|
- The small palette just below the Tool palette has the different snapping options. These tools are usually set to the button with the F in it for no snapping unless you need to snap.
The Menus
Illustration 2 shows all the menu items found in Modeler. To cut down on mouse operations, it is recommended that you memorize and use their keyboard shortcuts.
Illustration 2 - Modeler's Menus
|