Dedicated to Paulene who dedicates her life to the better understanding of Downs Syndrome children

Time to Go On Stripe

How Good Are My Surfaces?

There comes a time when on the learning alias path you realize that a model isn’t finished until it has NO GAPS between surface boundaries and it meets the construction Prefs. assigned to the project.If the surfacing tool is telling us that a boundary has say failed to achieve Position, then quite simply its no good and must be improved or deleted. Today I am not going into details of how and why. I just want to show how a model should be progressing in its early stages. (I will explain in more detail soon.)When building a car, I start in the center YO and build out from there. Here I have built the center section across the YO axis rather than build half a surface and then rely on layer symmetry to mirror the other half. It is very difficult to get a high qual.surf. with no break on the Yo line with this method, therefore I build my surfaces across the Y axis.This type of surface is called “Apex Free” I do this for at least 4 of the main surfaces “Primary Surfs.” i.e. Hood Top, Screen, Roof RR ScreenIn the first pic. I am happy with the surfs. as show-up by the Zebra Strip Diagnostic Shading (This is a very unforgiving level of rendering). The hood top is showing nice clean even stripes and the front end surface all have a nice even flow of stripes. However the red arrow is pointing to an unacceptable surface section. It looks to have too much crown and also to be irregular. I must put this right before continuing, as my wings/fenders “Secondary Surfs.” will take the boundaries of this surface as their datums. Most probably, I will delete the surf, modify the outer curve, checking it with the Locator-Curvature tool and then I will construct a new surface and keep working on it until it is right. it’s real important that we balance the Crvs which are adjacent on Sq. surfs. (Same amount of CV’s, edit points, Same degree and exactly the same curvature.)[slickr-flickr tag=”front end 1″]Here I can see a nice Ellipse on the screen and on the hood top, so I am pleased with these surfs.The Green arrow is pointing to a Tangent Break. In this case I wanted the surfaces to have an angular break at their common boundaries and these surfaces are both correct. A polished diamond has tangent breaks at its surf. boundaries, so that each surfaces reflects a different light value. This is where sculpture, precious stones and car design all meet.In this pic. I have used the Locator-Curve.Curvature tool set to Position to show/ test if adjacent surf. boundaries meet either  “GO” or Position. If a model does not have “GO” or better at all its surf. boundaries, then the data from the model would be rejected by any other CAD application that we attempted to transfer it to down line. My model is a Styling model, which would need to be transferred to other depts. on its way to becoming a production product (Class “A” surfacing, Aero-Dynamics, Cost and Feasibility, Engineering and Milling Machines etc.etc.) Here I can see that the green “P’s” are showing me that my model is good. I arrived at these surfaces after investing time, constructing high qual curves on which too build the surfs. I deleted the curves and the surfs. many times before arriving at a set that reached this level.Here I am showing a Powertracer Direct Rendering to give some idea as to how the model would look in real life. Note how important the tangent breaks become.________________________________________________________________
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