From the course: HBIM: Historic Building Re-creation

Establishing context

- So we are very close to having all of the parts we need to finish our fine detail version of the Corinthian Capital. There's just some remaining leafs and foliage that we need to create that engages with the volutes up at the top. So we've got this big long leaf here that kind of curls and kicks over to the small volute and then we have these other ones here that wrap around the top of the big volute. So let's take a look at how we can create those forms. Now actually, creating those forms is actually pretty simple. We've already talked about several techniques to do that. What I want to focus on in this movie actually is giving us the proper context to be able to do that successfully. So as you can see here, I'm looking at the entire capital again. And this is a copy of the medium detail version of the capital and I've just sort of opened it up because the item that we're going to create is this guy right here and it's called Medium Flouret at the moment. So if I select that and I do Edit Family that will open it up and the trouble you would have here when you start trying to modify this is there's no surrounding context so you really don't have any notion of how to build those leafs in order to get them to fit in the correct way. So there's now surrounding context here to help us build those leaves at the correct orientation in order to get them to fit into the overall capital the way we want and furthermore, if you look at this thing in Plan View, you can see that is oriented orthographically. So when it was inserted in the capital, it was actually rotated so that complicates things even a bit more because it makes it even more challenging for us to get the proper orientation. So I suppose one technique is we could take the entire capital and insert it in here as a family, get it oriented the way we want, build our leaves and then remove the overall capital. And I sometimes do use that approach but I'm going to share with you a different approach instead. So let's go back to the overall capital here and I'm going to go to the Floor Plan View. Now if I zoom in in the Floor Plan View here, you can see that I've set the view to Wireframe. When it's in Hidden Line, you can't see anything. It's all been covered up but if I go to Wireframe, we can see all of those nested components. Now I actually use this same basic concept that I'm about to show you when building the volutes in a previous movie. You may recall that we had a large wedge shaped void that cut this chamfer right here to get the two volutes to fit together. Well all I did was use an angle dimension and measure what that angle needed to be and that gave me a number of 17 and a half degrees and I took that number into that family editor and that's how I built that wedge. So it was a real easy thing to do once I had a sense of what the context was. Well here it's a little bit different because the context is more organic. Sure we have an angle here and we have an angle here but when we build the fine detail versions of those volutes, they're not angled anymore. I mean, they sort of are angled but they're much more organic in form. So here's what I did instead to get the context for the flouret. I just drew a spline and I'm going to start that spline kind of right over here at the midpoint between these two volutes and I'll just sort of kick it out and kind of pull it around the corner here and you're just sort of eyeballing where you think this thing needs to occur. Maybe out to here and then maybe kick it out a little bit. Okay? You can select this and fine tune it to get the shape to match to your liking. And then once you're satisfied with the shape, let's say we assume that that kind of gives us a sense of what we want it to do. Remember that the overall flouret family is actually oriented orthographically so we have to be able to match this angle as well. So if I go to Line and you want to make sure you turn off 3D Snapping. So if 3D Snapping is still on, uncheck that. And I'm going to snap a line just parallel to that existing flouret there. So now I'll tab in and I'll select that line I just drew and hold my Control key down and select the spline. Now you can do Control C if you want to keep these lines but I'm actually going to do Control X and just cut them right out of this file. I don't really need them in this file. And then I'll switch back over to my flouret here, go to the Floor Plan View and do Control V to paste them. Now just click anywhere to start your paste and then you can see that you're still in Paste mode and this is kind of important, if you click elsewhere, it'll deselect everything and finish the paste but you can stay within Paste mode and use Move and Rotate so that's what we're going to do here. I'm going to go to Move and snap to the end point of that line I drew and snap that right to the proper location there. I'll stay in Paste mode and go right to Rotate, tap the Space bar to change the center of rotation to that same endpoint, snap the starting angle along that line and then rotate it like so and now I have the proper context for this volute and when I go back to the 3D view because those are model lines they're going to show here as well but as you can see, they're too low so to fix that you can just simply select them and change the reference plane host here by choosing the Pick option and then you can pick one of your reference planes. See if I can get the right one in 3D. If I can't get it to select in 3D, I will switch to a front view. That's perhaps okay if you want this reference plane. That one's actually the vertical one. So if you want this reference plane down here, you might have to do that in front view. So I could select both of these elements, go to Front View and then just repeat the same thing. Just choose Pick here and then when it says, Pick a Plane, it actually turns out that that's the level and I can pick it and there it is now down at the base. But that just gives me that sense of context that I need so I can now move on to the next step and start building the forms that I want. So in the next movie, we'll start from a file that already has these forms in it and we'll go ahead and look at how the leaf is constructed.

Contents