From the course: Modo 2019 Essential Training

Creating a speaker 1: Building the enclosure - MODO Tutorial

From the course: Modo 2019 Essential Training

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Creating a speaker 1: Building the enclosure

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- [Instructor] So now it's time to get our hands dirty and create a simple asset in Modo. So in this exercise, we're going to make a speaker. So let's begin by building the enclosure for our speaker. The first step is to enter a component mode. So I'm going to click on the polygons button on the Modo toolbar. Then I'm going to go over to the create tab, and I'm going to click on the cube primitive. The next step will be to display the tool properties, which you can do by clicking on this button at the bottom of the tab. Doing this opens the tool properties pop-over. And you can pin this pop-over simply by dragging it when you do that. This little circle becomes solid and that means that the tool properties pop-over will be persistent in the interface every time you have a tool active. In this case, because I want a high level of precision and I also want to work to real world units, I'm going to enter all of the values manually. I want my speaker to be 400 millimeters tall, so in the size field, I'm going to enter a Y value of 400 millimeters. And then I'm going to make the X and the Z, 250 millimeters each. (typing) And because my speaker is 400 millimeters tall, I'm going to need to move it half that distance up, in order for it to sit on the floor. So I'm going to enter a Y value in the position field of 200 millimeters. With that done, if I click apply, it should create my cube for me. Next, I can drop the tool by hitting the Q key and with my cursor over the 3D viewport, if I hit the A key, it should zoom right in to my cube. Now the geometry that I've just created consists of faces. If you look at the viewport display at the bottom right, it says polygons face. Now faces can only ever have straight edges. They can never be curved. And since this speaker needs to have round holes, we need to convert the mesh to a type of geometry that will support curves. And we do this by holding down shift and tab. And this converts the mesh to Catmull Clark subdivision surfaces. And our viewport display now informs us that all the polygons in this mesh are now Catmull Clark, as you can see. But the problem we now have, as you can see, is that we no longer have any hard edges in our model. And we need to fix that. So I'm going to do that by switching to edges mode. Now remember, in Modo, if nothing is selected, then everything is selected. Which means that because I haven't made a specific selection, all of the edges in the model are currently selected, as the viewport display here at the bottom right is informing me. So I'm going to bevel all of the edges in this cube in order to create sharper transitions. And I do this by hitting the B key on my keyboard to summon the edge bevel tool. Once a tool is active, if I hit the 0 key at the top of my keyboard, it's going to bring up what are known as the advance tool handles. I'm going to do this now, and it just gives me a clearer idea of what's going on. Then I'm going to left click and drag in the viewport, until I reach a value of five millimeters for my edge bevel. Now as you can see, my edges are still quite soft and rounded, but I can sharpen them some more by adding more levels to my bevel. So I'm going to come over to the tool properties, and where it says round level, I'm just going to click on the arrow on the right to increase it from zero to one. And now our cube has sharp edges that have a very slight bevel. So I hit Q to drop the bevel tool, and let's zoom in on the corners of the cube to take a closer look at the geometry. Just going to click just outside the cube to deselect all these edges. If I hit tab to convert out Catmull Clark polygons back to ordinary faces, we can see more clearly what the bevel tool has done. By beveling the original edges, what we've done is we've created two additional edges, one on either side of each original edge. These additional edges are called holding edges, and they allow us to have sharper transitions within a Catmull Clark subdivision surface. So I'm going to hit shift tab to convert the mesh back to Catmull Clark polygons. And next, I'll hit the A key to reframe the viewport around our speaker enclosure. So now that we've created the basic structure for our speaker, the next step will be to create some holes for the woofer and the tweeter, which is what we're going to do in the next video.

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