Okay… here’s a quick one that will really help in setting camera position with AliasStudio 2009. Consider how to accomplish the following design task…
We have to do some interior design concept sketches for the new yacht our company is working on. Yeah, I know, very few of us actually work for yacht design companies, but it happens to be something I am working on this week so just go with it. [grin] Anyway, as I was saying, we have to do these sketches for concept approval before we go ahead and start with the technical surfacing.
Ideally, we want to sketch in context to where the design will actually end up being used, in this case the main deck level salon. One of the 4 default views when you start working with AliasStudio is a Perspective Camera View as you can see in the image above. It’s a beautiful thing… you don’t have to even create the camera, you get it by default. The problem is how to move it to get the views you want to generate sketch canvas images from.
By holding down the Shift-Alt keys and using a combination of either mouse or tablet stylus movement and key selections you can Tumble, Track and Dolly the camera view and by extension actually move the camera itself. However, the center of rotation of the view is tied initially to the view (world) origin by default. This quickly becomes problematic, especially if you are working on a large model in an area at a great distance from the view origin.
The solution is to set a new point of interest. This can be controlled via the Preferences/General Preferences/Input dialog box, but it should be on by default so all you have to do is select a piece of geometry while holding down the Shift-Alt key combination.
If you select a model edge you can track the point of interest along the edge. Better yet, if you select a surface you can track along the surface, and the view direction will be normal to the surface at that point. The “normal direction” indicator will be blue or yellow, depending on whether or not the normal is facing towards you or away from you respectively. Way cool!
To set the new view orientation, all there is for us to do is to select the blue or yellow arrow and the view will change so that we are looking down the normal. Selecting any of the direction arrows in the viewing panel (seen in the image above) will change the view to that orientation with respect to the new point of interest.
So, with our view set, we change the orientation a bit, turn on the Hardware Shade for this view and then copy the image to our current canvas.
Voila, we can now sketch and paint right on top of this view of the model. It’s a beautiful thing…
Subscribe
Recent Comments