Explore the intricacies of the Sculpt Workspace in T-spline modeling with this comprehensive guide. Understand the functionalities of the Sculpt tools while creating and modifying basic primitives without the need to save or open any files.
Key Insights
- The Sculpt Workspace in T-spline modeling offers the capability to sketch, construct, and inspect, similar to the Model Workspace, but also provides exclusive Create and Modify tools.
- Creating a sculpt primitive such as a box enables the user to adjust dimensions like length, width, and height and change the number of faces on each side. It also provides an option to apply G2 continuity, resulting in a smooth model with rounded corners.
- Edit form function in the Modify tools allows a user to select a point, edge, or face, and move, scale, rotate or combine these actions. The Sculpt workspace also allows the placement of symmetry across any two faces, automatically updating the opposite face, edge, or point when one is edited, which is beneficial when building symmetrical parts.
In this video, we will briefly look at the Sculpt workspace and have a quick introduction to T-Spline modeling. I will not be opening or using one of the files found in the datasets.
I will just be working in an untitled file that I will not save at the end of the video. Feel free to follow along or just watch to learn about the Sculpt workspace. If I go up to my workspaces, you will see the Sculpt workspace is not available.
We can access the Sculpt workspace by hitting this button, Create Form. When we hit that button, we are automatically placed in the Sculpt workspace, and we can see the Sculpt tools appear.
You can see that we can Sketch, Construct, or Inspect, just like we can in the Model workspace, but we get new Create and Modify tools. We can see that we have some basic primitives under Create.
We have a lot of Modify tools, which we will not cover in this video. And we can place Symmetry and look at some utilities. So let's get started by creating a simple box.
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I will place this on the bottom plane and draw a box of any size. You can see that when we create a Sculpt primitive, we have an option to change the length, width, and height, but also the number of faces on each side. We can also place a direction, Symmetry (which we will go into later), and change our operation.
Again, I don't care about the size because this is just a play file. And I will hit OK. You can see that we have created our first T-Spline object.
This object is rounded at the corners because it has G2 continuity applied between all of the faces. This means that the shape will be perfectly smooth if we build it the correct way. If we go up to our utilities and go to Display Mode, we can see that we have three types of display modes.
We are currently in the Smooth Display (ALT + 3). But I can switch to Box Display (ALT + 1). This shows a more traditional box that we might see when modeling in the Model workspace. Our T-Spline primitive is using this box as a base model, and then applying our G2 continuity to create a smooth model. We can also use the Control Frame display, which shows both our box and our smooth model at the same time.
I'll go back to my Smooth Display, and we can look at editing our model. If I go to the Modify tab, we can see that there are a lot of different options to edit our smooth shape. For now, I just want to talk about the Edit Form tool.
When I select Edit Form, I can see that I have many options. But in its most basic sense, this is a move tool. If I select a point, edge, or face, I can move that face, scale, rotate, or use a combination of all of those options.
I'll hit Cancel and undo. You can also find Edit Form by right-clicking and going up to the right to go to Edit Form. When I edit my model, you will see that I can select any combination of edges, faces, and points.
And again, feel free to play around in this model as much as you'd like. We will not be saving it when we finish this model. We can see that our model has become this weird, wonky shape, and we can always go back to our Display Mode and change it to Box or to Control Frame.
We can see that I'm creating a very harsh angle here, so I can edit my form again and bring those points back. I will go to Display Mode and once again go to my Smooth Display. When we created our box, we could have placed symmetry about the box.
If I go up to Symmetry and find Mirror, I can now select a face and select an opposite face to display symmetry across those faces. Now when I edit one of my faces, edges, or points, the opposite face, edge, or point will automatically update. Symmetry is very useful when building parts that can be either symmetrical across a mirror plane or around a circular axis.
Feel free to play around with different primitives in the Sculpt workspace, different Modify tools, or different types of symmetry. Again, I will not be saving this file. This is just to introduce the Sculpt workspace, the tools, and to get you to play around with T-Spline modeling.
When you have finished, go ahead and click Finish Form, and we can see in our bodies that we have created a solid body. If we used one of the solid T-Spline primitives or if we've used a thin T-Spline primitive, we will have created a mesh. Feel free to play around as much as you'd like in the T-Spline modeling Sculpt workspace, but for now, I will end this video and I will see you in the next video.
