From the course: Surfacing an F1 Wheel In Alias

Additional Notes - Alias Tutorial

From the course: Surfacing an F1 Wheel In Alias

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Additional Notes

- Before we get started with surfacing, I just want to talk about a couple of techniques that I use when I'm surfacing to help me with the modeling process. I want to cover these because it can cause a little bit of confusion as you are starting to open up my exercise files and the files may open in slightly different states compared to what you have on your screen. So let's go ahead and create a very simple entity. We'll create a sphere. Click and space, Alt , L to reframe. And during the modeling process, I will change the transparency of these entities to help me visualize entities that may be behind this particular component. So, open the control panel. I've opened up Transparency. And you can see under Surfaces, I can actually change the transparency of the wire-frame here. Now, it's not changing it of the texture, it's just purely the wire-frame, or in other words, the isoparms, which are the U and V lines that we see here. So I can change the transparency like this, and let's go up to Object Display, Diagnostic Shading, and if I shade this now, I can also change the transparency of the shader. So I can see behind the object. Now I can see the grid-lines. Now, this also applies to other entities like meshes. So if I select this entity, go to Mesh, Mesh Tessellation, I'm just right-clicking over these, NURBS to mesh. And I'm going to go ahead and move that over, and you'll notice that the mesh itself now also has a transparency setting like this. So during the modeling process, I will tweak these as I need to to help me visualize the particular model. Now, one thing to note here is once you've done this and you've set these values like so, if we open up a new file, I'm going to say Delete, and I'm going to say yes to this, so we're opening a brand new file, let's go ahead now and create a brand new cube. Click and space, Alt, L. You'll notice that the cube now carries over the same value of transparency that was set in the previous session. So if you've changed the transparencies in your previous session and you open up a brand new exercise file, the values that you set in your previous session will be carried over. So if they look a little bit different to the exercise files that I'm using, just note that this is what's the issue here. And again, it's not really an issue. It's purely a visualization. We are not changing the entity in any way. So let's go ahead and create a quick mesh again. So Mesh, Tessellation, NURBS to Mesh. And we'll move that over like so. And there we have it. Another thing I wanted to quickly mention is the setup that I'm using for Alias. I'm using a MacBook Pro, but I'm using a Windows keyboard. But again, the functionality between Windows and a Mac system is exactly the same. So all these options that you'll see at the top will be exactly the same, the workflow is exactly the same. The only thing that may be a little bit different now, obviously, is going to be the keyboard operations. So for example, in a Windows system, Control and Shift will open up my Marking menu. Shift and Alt, left mouse button to rotate, middle mouse button to pan, and right mouse button to zoom in, and that's using Shift and Alt on Windows. So it's the same configuration on Mac. We can use the Control and Shift key to open up the Marking menu. And you can use the Shift and Command key to do our rotate, pan, and zoom, using the left, the middle, and the right mouse button. So that's just a little bit about the setup that I use. Mainly Windows is the preferred system for Alias, but I'm using a Mac here in this case, and the functionality is exactly the same.

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