tutorial FEBRUARY 22, 2001 • page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Home

Getting Started with Amapi 4.1
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If you wish to examine the design interactively, and if you have a decent 3D OpenGL card, you may want to use a pop-up viewer: View > New View > Free View. You can use the mouse in this view to rotate (left button) or move in/out (right button or CONTROL-click on the Mac).

There are also various View Modes, which correspond to the four display types available also in the Workspace. To get rid of the solid work bench, use the Hide tool in the control panel (Dark Ghost) and click the bench in the main workspace. (The floating pop-up viewer is for examining only; no editing there.) Swipe the ghost tool away when done. If the floating view doesn't show the view immediately, just use the arrow keys to refresh a slightly different orientation. If Windows passes the keyboard focus to the small floating view window and you need it back to the main workspace, just click the menubar or the workspace view.
 

Punching out a smile
We'll now use a Boolean operation with the Punch tool to cut out a shape from the bottle. First, hit 2 for a front view and 0 to view all. Then let's draw the shape. It will be a polyline shaped like a smiling mouth, starting from the outside right of the bottle, overlapping into the bottle and ending well outside of the bottle again.

To help in drawing the exact desired shape, toggle to perspective view. The fourth icon from the left on the control panel at the bottom of the screen toggles perspective on/off. Or, select the menu Tools > Control Panel > Perspective.

Now select the Draw tool again from the construction toolkit; position the coordinate anywhere on the scene; and select the Polyline tool from the draw palette. Or, select Tools > Construction > Draw > Polyline. And click somewhere on the bottle (e.g. right side) to position the axes there.

Start drawing a shape from the upper right quadrant area outside of the bottle, and work your way into the bottle by creating a smiling mouth shape. Then move down and draw back out.

Hit ENTER to finish. Swipe away if you still have the draw palette up there. Use the TAB key to rename curve to "Smile." Click the Bottle to make it the current object. It will be highlighted in light blue. A little white ball is also shown at the center of its bounding box. Select the Punch tool at the bottom of the modeling toolkit. It looks like a cube from which a sphere has been cut out. Or select from the menu Tools > Modeling > Punch. Then click the "Smile" curve. Amapi will use it to throw cutting blades across the curve so that it becomes like a cookie cutter cutting across the bottle. Click, drag and move the portion that is inside the "mouth area" away to the right.

Switch back to Perspective mode. Then hit CTRL-S to save the current shape.
Giving thickness to the bottle
Select the bottle. We'll want to make it look a bit more realistic by giving it thickness.

From the Modeling toolkit, select the Thickness tool. (It's the icon just above the Punch tool you used previously). Or use the menu Tools > Modeling > Thickness.

Somewhere on the bottle a red/white thickness preview will appear. You may get it to switch to a different area on the bottle by using the arrow keys to orient the view differently. The thickness preview is always placed on a facet that is nearly parallel to your viewing direction, so that you get a good side view of the thickness.

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