There's
also a bunch of really handy shortcuts for quick view controls
on the numeric keypad. Imagine you have a joystick right smack
on the 5 key in the center of the numeric keypad. Press that
key (5), and you'll be looking down at the scene from the top.
Press the 2 key, and you'll switch to a front view. Press the
4 key, and you'll be on a left side view, etc.
Please practice
these for a few seconds, and make sure you have NUM LOCK set
for the numeric keypad.
[ 2 ] …….
Front view
[ 5 ] …….
Top view
[ 8 ] …….
Back View
[ 4 ] …….
Left View
[ 6 ] …….
Right view
and the
following for zooming in and out:
[ 0 ] ……..
Zoom extent (show entire scene)
[ . ] …….
Zoom out (decimal point 'dot' to the right of the 'zero' key
on numeric key pad)
[ 3 ] ……..
Zoom In (above the 'dot' key.
And finally
the following will work as soon as we have placed an object
into the scene:
[ 1 ] ……..
Zoom Region - to a detailed area on the part(s)
Now, what
about the other hand? Move the mouse to the right edge of the
screen. When you reach the edge, you'll see the set of icons
switch to a different set. Move the cursor back in, and then
move it again to the right edge. As you reach the edge of the
screen again, you'll see yet another display of icons. Do this
one more time and you'll get back to the first of the three
toolkits. These are the primary tools offered in the Amapi workshop
interface layout: the Construction tools, the Modeling tools,
and the Assembly tools.
|
The
Construction toolkit
|
The
Modeling toolkit
|
The
Assembly toolkit
|
Hit the
SPACEBAR and you'll get to see a 4th toolkit, with
lighting, rendering and animation tools. Toggle the SPACEBAR
again to get back to the primary 3 toolkits.
Practice
this out of the wrist action a few times to get the hang of
it. You'll see soon that this is one of the fun features in
Amapi, which makes it fast to get on with the modeling tasks
at hand. Whenever you're done with a particular tool, you'll
be able to just throw it away to the right edge.
Let's
draw a circle
Let's
start from a good orientation: hit 0, then 2 and then 5 to view
the entire scene from the front and then from the top. We're
looking down at the work bench.
Select the
construction toolkit. The second icon from the top (DRAW) looks
like an ink pen. Click it. A pop-up palette will appear with
a few 2D drawing tools, such as circle, rectangle, lines, etc....
Click the Circle tool. Or you can select from the Tools menu:
Tools > Construction > Draw > Circle.
At this
point you'll see two colored axes (e.g. Red/Green), which indicate
the orientation of the main axes in World space. They change
as you change your camera orientation with the arrow keys. The
X, Y and Z axes are represented in Red, Green and Blue.
