Medium detail fluting

- In the previous two movies we explored the medium detail shaft and we specifically focused on the entasis and plotting the curve of the entasis in the top two thirds of the shaft. Well, in the medium detail, I've also added these lines here that are drawn directly on the surface of the 3D form to represent where the fluted shaft occurs. Now when we get to the fine detail version, we're actually going to carve the channels out of the 3D geometry and make a true 3D shape there of that form. But that's a much heavier bit of geometry, and so in medium detail, I think it's enough to just suggest that there's flutes there and especially from smaller scales, these lines are sufficient. Now, I've got a view here called Front Cropped, and you can see that in addition to the lines, you're actually seeing these points right here. And those are really key to making this work. And it actually also explains why I've nested my standard traditional family into the massing environment. There's a feature in the massing environment that allows you to draw a line directly on the surface of curved forms. And that's exactly what we've done here. So I've provided a separate file called Shaft Start. And it's sort of halfway complete. And what we're going to do here is kind of complete the process. Now I warn you ahead of time, it's fairly tedious. If I select all of that, and go to Filter, there are 20 reference points there, there's another 20 here, and we need to create an additional 20 along here. So there's a total of 60 points that need to be plotted on the surface of this curved form. Furthermore, each of those points, if you select one of those, has two coordinate parameters. So if you scroll down on the Properties palette, one is called the Hosted U Parameter. The other is called the Hosted V Parameter. And that determines the location of the point on the surface. So let me show you how that works. I'm going to go to the Point command right here, Point Element, and then when you move your mouse onto the screen, it will highlight the surface. So there's the surface here, there's one here. You want the top half, not the bottom half. And I want to just sort of click anywhere, maybe right about there. Now I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to click nine more times. One, two, three, four, five. Six, hold down my Shift key, drag the wheel to orbit a little bit, seven, eight, nine. And that should give me 10 points. I need to 10 points on that half, and I need another 10 points on the opposite half. Now you can do the first 10 and then come back and do the second 10, doesn't really matter. But when these points are placed, notice that if you look over here, they are just random points based on wherever you click the point. Now, the U parameter is along the curve. And the V parameter is along the height. So, what we need to do is somehow figure out exactly where we want those points to occur. So let me take you to Family Types next. And show you what I've got set up here. For the vertical, it was fairly easy because all 20 points that I showed you at the base use the same V parameter. All of the 20 points at the top use the same V parameter, and all of the ones that we've just drawn here in the middle also need the same V parameter. So V2 is the one that we're going to use for all the points here in the middle. And that's currently set to this fixed number of 006363. I just did that by trial and error. I figured out where I wanted the points to occur, and once they were there, I just put that number in. Now, you may recall that the numbers for these kinds of parameters here are proportions to begin with. So we don't actually need to do any kind of multiplier. When the family flexes, the proportion will be the same. So that .1036 whatever is going to be the same regardless of how tall the shaft is. So you can select all of these points, and this is the easy part, you come over here, and you take the V parameter. Click the small Associate Family Parameter button. And assign that V parameter to V2. And you see how that puts them all in the same general height. So they're now all at the same height location with respect to the overall form. So again, that was the easy part. Now comes the tedious part. It's not hard, it's just tedious. Because now I have to select each point one at a time and assign the U values. So I'll start with the one on the right there, and that's going to be U10. And you see it moves over. Then this one is going to be U9. And you just have to pay attention here and work your way through and do them one at a time. For the last couple, if you have a hard time seeing them, just hold your Shift key down and drag the wheel again to orbit around and you can do your last few points. And then you could see that they're now all equally spaced. Now, how did I get them equally spaced? Well, let's go to a Plan view to talk about that. When we zoom in here in Plan, there's a total of 20 points going around the perimeter. It turns out that that U parameter is actually measured in radiance. So all you had to do was go into the Family Types here and notice that the formulas that I have here are all based on pi. So, formulas for one through nine were easy, because all I had to do was take pi. So one half of a circle is what we're dealing with. Because to create that cylinder, it's actually two curved forms touching one another. So each one is 180 degrees. So one half of a circle is just pi, radiance, and circumference. So I just took pi and divided by 10. And that gave me the location of point one. Then I took that and multiplied it by two, by three, by four, all the way by nine to get to here. Now, to get U10, I did something a little bit different. Here, I just took pi, the final value, like of a full 180, but that was putting it in a bad spot. It didn't like it. So I just subtracted a little bit from it. So I basically just said, take 180 degrees and just subtract a tiny bit. And I did 01, but you could do 001. But anyway, that seemed to do the trick and it got all the points in the correct location. So that's all I did there. And now we just have to repeat the entire process on the other side. When you select all 20 points, you'll see a little question mark right here for the vertical parameter. Don't worry about it, you can just select them all and assign them to V2 again and they'll all correct themselves. So now I have all the points I need. I have my three sets of points. So the final step is to actually draw the model lines but I want to make sure that those model lines are drawing on the surface. Now down here, they're vertical, they're straight up and down, so it doesn't matter. But it's on this curved surface here where it does. So you go to your Model Line command here, and then the line and the trick is you want to make sure that 3D Snapping is turned on. And in addition to that, you check this box to say Follow the Surface. And then you just have to pay close attention and you can kind of use the surface as a guide here. So I want to start right at that point. I want to pull straight up to the next point here. If you get a slightly off axis, just click OK, and then keep going. Now, notice that this would follow the curve here. You see how it's following the curve? But I want to go straight up again to that point right there. Now, press Escape one time to stay in the command, and then again, here comes the tedious part. You have to repeat this another 19 times. So press Escape again. One, two, click OK. Three clicks, Escape. One, two, OK. Three clicks, Escape, and so on. You can use the Shift and drag your wheel to rotate as you work. And when you're finished, you double Escape to cancel out of the command. Now, you may recall in the finished version of this I was not displaying the points. The points won't display when you load this into a project, but if you don't want to see the points here you can type VG for Visibility Graphics, go to the Annotation Categories tab and uncheck Reference Points. Now, if you do that they're off in this view, so what I'll sometimes do is create two copies of the view. One that has the points turned on and one that has them turned off. Now, I'm using model lines for this purpose and I think it's an effective way to represent the fluting and I like the fact that I'm able to set the distance that they start from the top and from the bottom. And I based those distances on the Tivoli column. However, there is another alternative. This version of the column is a simple version that's actually part of the model that's up on projectzone.com, so you can go up there and download the model and you would find this column among the families within that file. Now here, what Andy has done is he's just used a material along the surface instead of drawing the actual lines. So that's another option that's just as effective to represent that there's a fluted shaft here. And if we take a look at the Manage tab and go to Materials, then you can see that all he's done in this material is applied a vertical line to it. So you could see it's called Exterior Fluted Shaft. And he just applied a vertical line pattern to the surface of that material. And it's another very effective way of representing fluting. So whether you do it by drawing the individual lines like I've done, or whether you use the Material option, both are very effective ways to suggest that this is a fluted shaft without creating a very heavyweight model that would be difficult to work with in smaller scales.