Fast concept development with Loft and Sweep

00:00

Welcome to another Shapr3D tutorial. My name is Andrew Cameradella. I'm an industrial design consultant and professor of industrial design at DePaul University. In this video, we're going to take a look at this watering can here and create a 3D model that primarily uses lofts and sweeps, which will give us the ability to quickly edit this model and create variations and do some form studies that way. Let's get started. You can see I brought in one image already, and we're going to bring in a second image for our top view.

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So I'm going to click Add. I'm going to click Image. Image is going to open up our folder. I'm going to bring in our top view.

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Our top view gets brought in at a different angle than we were expecting. So the first thing I'm to do is align this to our grid. There's a couple of things I did to prepare these images too. The first one was I made sure that the object was aligned to this grid. And I took a photo of the object as far away and as zoomed in as I could in order to make the dimensions as close to the object as I could on the map.

01:06

And then finally I aligned the photos in Photoshop so that they were square to the image plane. That's going to make our lives a lot easier. So here you can see that the two images are not scaled correctly. The image I brought in is a little bit larger. So I'm going to click OK here. I'm going to make a sketch here to draw a line that aligns with our grid. And as closely as I can get it, it doesn't have to be perfect, but

01:34

If we click on this line, you'll see that we get a measurement. I'm going to copy that measurement here. And I'm going to use that as part of the scale factor. So I'm going to go into scale after I click on the image. I'm going to just drag this out a little bit. And then I'm going to type in 25.4, which is how many millimeters are in an inch. I'm going to divide that by our measurement that we took on our grid. And that should get our image's grid scaled to our environment units. That looks pretty good there.

02:03

And then the final thing here is to align this image to the side view image. And so I'm going to take this center line of the object and I'm going to line that up. And I want to make sure that this front edge here is lined up with that origin point. And that gets us pretty close right there. I also want to change the opacity of this image. So if I go to Items, you see that you get an opacity number here. I'm just going to drop this down to 50%.

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So now we have our two images and we can start using those to build our 3D model. I'm going to click Sketch. I'm going to just draw sketches here that represent the profiles that I see in the top view of this watering can body. I'm just going to start using a bunch of arcs here and get as close as I can to the actual watering can body.

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And I only need to draw half of the watering can because it's symmetrical. And we'll just copy that over later. I have these arcs here. I'm going to make that tangent. And we have these arcs here. I'm going to make that tangent. And then we need to connect this down to our center line so that we can mirror across. I'm going to click to our center point there. I'm going to just bring this line here and line it up with the watering can body.

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And this is roughly vertical. And I'm just going to give this a dimension 14 so that it locks this in place. And I'm also going to make this tangent here. And now we're just going to line this edge up best we can.

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Really just work on fine-tuning these curves. The more work we do here, the closer we're going to get to the original object.

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And I'm going to draw a final line over here like this.

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And I'm going to make these tangent.

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Again, I'm just kind of roughing these out right now. We're really trying to make a drawing that will allow us to edit the model easily in the future. I'm trying to lock some of the elements in these sketches in place so that way the sketches don't break when we move them around. But I also want to maintain some flexibility so that I can alter the sketches and change some of the forms.

04:43

One of the last things I wanted to do in this sketch was to add a horizontal line here, and we're going to use that to project to other sketches so that things stay aligned. So that's a complete sketch there for us. We closed off this area, and so we could do a simple extrude here. But I'm trying to actually make this more complex form and also make it editable. So what we're going to do is create a new construction plane of type offset, and we're going to select our horizontal plane.

05:13

And we're going to also move this up so that it matches with the top of our watering can roughly. So once I have that plane, I can start a sketch on that plane there, brings us into our top view. And the first thing I'd like to do is project this center line onto that sketch. And that gives us something that we can build off of. So this sketch here is currently not locked. So we're going to lock this down so it doesn't slide around.

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because it's not linked. And then I'm going to start building our top view here of the watering can. So I'm going to bring this inset a little bit because the top view and the side view don't exactly match just because of the parallax of the camera. And I'm going to make sure that they're perpendicularly aligned.

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Same thing on this side, perpendicular. And then I'm going to click Arc and I'm going to do the same thing I did before, where I'm just going to draw out these shapes and kind of rough in the top section of our watering can. I'm going to also make sure that these are tangent so that everything stays aligned pretty well.

06:35

And that should be enough for our top view. And if we look from the side, bringing this inset in, you can see that it kind of lines up pretty well with the very top edge here that we were looking at from the side view. And now we have an area here that we could loft to. So I'm planning on lofting between those two surfaces. I also need to build the bottom of the watering can. I'm going to do the same thing I did before. I'm going to add a construction plane. We're going to select our bottom view.

07:06

Going to drag this down. You can kind of take a look from the side and get kind of close there. Click check. And I'm going to also create a sketch down there. So I'm going to click our bottom view here and I'm going to project all of the edges from our top view onto the bottom view. We'll click done there. And I'm going to do the same thing where I'm going to take our line here. That is our center line. And I'm going to just lock that in place so it doesn't slide around.

07:36

So the next thing we can do is start building solids. I'm going to click on our surface areas here and I can click all three. What will happen is I'll get a curved loft between all of those three sections. And that's not exactly what we want. So I'm going to come in here and going to deselect this bottom loft and I'm just going to select these two lofts. So I'll click loft like that. That gives us the top section of our watering can. And I'm also going to loft the bottom section here of our watering can, like loft. So now we have

08:06

those shapes there driving the overall shape of the watering can. I'd like to do a little bit of quick cleanup. I'm noticing right here that the photo that I have imported doesn't quite align that well with the model. So what we can do is just slide this photo a little bit over so that it matches up better with that origin point that we started off with. And we can also see that now our model doesn't line up very well with the photo. And so what we can do is go into our item tree here.

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And I can do a little bit of cleanup here and I can start clicking on these sketches. I'm going to just rename this sketch here so that I can find them more easily. This is going to be our top view. And then this sketch here is going to be our bottom view.

08:56

And so by clicking on the mid plane here, I can actually select the line in the sketch and I can drag this over and you can see that our model updates immediately to reflect that change. And so we can see that we're getting our model a little bit closer to that photo that we had. So the nice thing here is that we can also take advantage of this later on to be able to edit the model and create variations. So I'm just going to get this to be a little bit closer.

09:25

And again, like this isn't such a big deal if we're making a bunch of variations, but I just wanted to show that you can easily adjust the shape of these parts. And so that looks pretty good there. And the very next set of steps we're going to do is to create a series of sketches to define this neck. So I am going to create a new sketch on our side view. And we can take our spline.

09:52

And I'm going to just make a spline with two points. And that's really just to make it easy to control. You can use more spline points, but I find that the actual splines themselves are not very smooth. And just by clicking on the line and the handles at each of the points, I can get that spline to move around where I want it to. And then I'm going to make another spline here to define the bottom of this neck.

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So I can select again the spline point there and I'm just gonna click and drag these. Get me pretty close to the actual shape of the neck.

10:32

Again, I'm using splines here to make something that allows us to edit pretty quickly in the future. It's going to give us some flexibility in how we can modify the shape. All right, so that's the neck. The top and the bottom spline are going to be our guide curves. And the reason I drew those first is that when we draw a sketch that is on a different construction plane, so we're going to take this and we're going to do another offset.

11:01

I can offset this over so that it intersects with the end of the spout here. When I sketch over there, what's going to happen is Shapr3D is going to give me the points where that sketch intersects with those splines. So we're going to use that to help drive this other sketch. So I'm going to draw a cross section here for that neck. Again, you can kind of...

11:30

draw that however you like. I'm just going to do a simple arc and I'm going to draw a vertical line between those points. So those two points are sitting on those splines. And so what should happen is that if I select, I'm going to turn off the side view really quickly. If I select this sketch here, I can adjust the spline. You can see it's changing shape to match with the splines and we're not going to take advantage of that feature just yet.

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I am going to come in here and make a new side plane.

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I'm going to offset this over here like that. And I'm going to add sketch to that plane.

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And again, we get our points, our intersection points for those two splines. I'm going to do another arc here like that. And if we look at our top view, you'll notice that even though the neck is getting thicker this way, it's not getting that much wider side to side. So this is how we're controlling that overall shape.

12:39

And you'll see in just a second how that helps us out. I'm going to thicken this a little bit just to match up. And I'm missing that line there. So I'm going to unlock that point there. I'm just going to drag these up to the other point. You'll see that the lock then reinstates itself.

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I'm going to take this and move it over. Looks pretty close. All right. And now I'm going to do a loft here. So this is a loft using guide curves. We're going to go to tools. We can select loft. And I'm going to select this face here to this face over here. It's currently not letting me select. So I'm going to turn off our bodies. There we go.

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And you can see that without the guide curves, the loft just kind of goes between the two profiles. I'm going to click and add those two guide curves. I'm going to click Done there. And now we have a three-dimensional shape that matches our neck. So we're going to turn the image back on so that we can see how well this thing matches up. And we're not quite lined up here on the way that the spout looks. And I want to get back into this sketch here.

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And I want to move this face so that it's shifted over. And I can click the Move Rotate button. And I can actually drag this sketch over further. And you'll see that when I do that, these lines no longer line up with the splines that I created. So I'm just going to move this around. And my body then comes back. So Shapr3D does a good job of reconnecting that to our original loft command. And so if I turn our image back on, you can see that we

14:32

actually managed to move that over further so we can get that spout to match up more with the body. At this point, we have the spout and the main body of the watering can. I'd really like to focus on now making variations of this watering can. We've done a good job of matching up the drawings and elements to the photos that we imported. So I'm going to hide these now.

14:58

And I'm just going to focus on making variations here using the sketches that we had. We spent most of the time here setting up these sketches so that we can do this very easily. I'm going to select all of these bodies here and I'm just going to make a copy of it. And I'm going to unlink that copy. So I have an original version of the body that we just built. We go look at our history. You'll see that we have an unlinked copy represented here.

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This unlinked copy can actually be moved anywhere in the history and it won't affect the rest of the model. It shows us these three bodies that are just going to exist here, but they're not going to affect the rest of the history. So I can use all the tools that we've used so far to really alter the shape while maintaining a history of all the variations we've created. As an example, I can come in here and change the neck of this watering can.

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And by just dragging these splines around, I can create different variations, which then I can save by creating unlinked copies. So let's say I wanted to change that neck. I can double click on all these bodies here and I can create a copy, unlink that copy and make a new variation. Likewise, I could come in here and I can click move, rotate.

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and I can start to modify this body to get different styles. Same thing here, I can come into this sketch, which is our mid-sketch, and check this line, and I can move this, and I get a different style.

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Again, I can select these, select copy, unlink that copy and move it over. But very quickly we can generate a bunch of different concepts, a bunch of different ideas on how this watering can might actually look.

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We'll do one more here.

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scale this down.

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generate different interesting forms.

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Just like that.

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So now keep in mind that these copies that we're making over here, they're not linked to any of the sketches. So we can still make direct edits to these models, but they're not going to be reflected in any of the sketches. And it's going to be a little bit more difficult to control the individual features, at which point it might make sense to come back and use the individual sketches to make variations on those components and sort of mix and match all of those bodies. But we can very easily...

17:57

make a bunch of different concepts without too much trouble. Once we've created the unlinked copies, we can actually direct edit the bodies that we have to finish out the model or create different variations from that as well. So for example, I could come in here and create a union between these three bodies. And that would then allow me to do something like a mirror, for example. But I can also copy this body now.

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and I can make another variation here. So I can, for example, come in here and start to fillet or chamfer these edges and start to play around with the individual styles that are on these bodies as well. So I could come here. The other thing I could do is I could select this and create a mirror.

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And that way I can finish out this model and now I have a complete object. So this concludes our tutorial where I showed you how to create a set of sketches that drive bodies to quickly ideate different concepts within a set of features. Thanks for watching. See you next time.