From the course: Modo 2019 Essential Training

The Work Plane - MODO Tutorial

From the course: Modo 2019 Essential Training

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The Work Plane

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- [Instructor] Working in three dimensions on a two dimensional screen can be quite challenging. Especially if you need to work at awkward angles. So MODO pioneered the concept of the Work Plane in order to get around this tricky problem. And what the Work Plane does is that it allows you to control the exact location and angle or every modeling operation that you perform. Now before we start looking at the Work Plane. There's a couple of settings that I recommend you change. First of all. Let's open the viewport options by clicking on the little cog icon here at the top-right. And going to the Visibility tab. Here there is an option for Show Work Plane, you want to change that from the default of Active to Always. And when you do that you can see this new grid appears in the viewport. Now just so you can see things a bit more clearly, I'm just going to temporarily hide the grid. Now keep an eye on the Work Plane as I tumble in the view port. You can see that it flips as I tumble past a certain point. And here in the bottom-left hand corner where you have the X, Y and Z axis. You've got a mini Work Plane that's displayed and that also flips when I tumble the viewport as you can see. Along the right-hand side of the model toolbar There's also a Work Plane button. If you hold down Alt, that will allow you to set some options so I'm going to click the options. What I'm going to do is I'm going to check the option to Lock the Plane to Origin and then I'm going to dismiss the popover. Now locking the Work Plane to origin just prevents it from floating around in 3D space in unpredictable ways. And I still have the option to move the Work Plane away from the origin manually but it will be when I decide to do so. Rather than making MODO make the decision on my behalf. So what does the Work Plane actually do? Well put simply, it draws a grid in 3D space upon which I can draw out shapes and start modeling. So let me just hover over the item list and click the N key to create a new empty mesh. And with my Work Plane drawn vertically in 3D space. I'm going to select the cube primitive and I'm just going to draw out my cube. And as you can see, it's drawn on the Work Plane. So the Work Plane allows me to control where my cube is drawn. Now if I just tumble the viewport so the Work Plane flips and I drop the cube tool, and then activate it once again. You can see that now my cube is being drawn on this horizontal Work Plane. And I can control the location of the Work Plane in 3D space. For example, if I hit the Page Up key a few times you can see that it's moving the Work Plane upwards. If I hit Page Down it moves it back down. I can also rotate it in 3D space by holding down Shift + Page Up or Shift + Page Down. If I want to reset the Work Plane to its original position I hit the End key. But more importantly, I can align the Work Plane to a specific selection. So let me select this object and let's rotate the viewport so we can see a little bit more clearly. And then I'm going to switch to polygon mode. Now let's imagine that I needed to model some dials on this angled surface here. Well without the Work Plane, it would be really difficult to model the dials in place at the correct angle. But with MODO's Work Plane it's actually very simple. All I need to do is to select that polygon and then simply click on the Work Plane button and as you can see, that has aligned my Work Plane with that polygon perfectly. So now all I need to do is to create a new mesh and I can zoom in on this angled surface and let's activate the cylinder tool and draw out a dial which is perfectly aligned to my angled surface. And MODO allows you to have multiple Work Planes within the same project. By means of a bookmark system. I'm going to hold down the Alt key just to open the Options for the Work Plane here. I'll just drag the popover and pin it. And let's assign a bookmark to this Work Plane and call it Slant. And I'll select my original mesh once again and this time I'll select this polygon and use the Align Work Plane to Selection button and that draws a new Work Plane aligned to that particular polygon. And I can assign a new bookmark to that one. Let's call it Top. And with those two bookmarks saved, I can switch between them at any time using this Use Bookmark menu. So let's switch back to Slant and then let's switch back to Top. So in conclusion, MODO's Work Plane makes working in 3D space much easier simply because it allows you to control the exact placement and angle of all your modeling operations.

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