Discover how to refine a 3D model by adjusting sweep and void forms to create a clean cut against a wall. The article also explores how to add rounded edges to a profile for a more realistic look and how to cap an empty void in the model effectively.
Key Insights
- The sweep and void forms in a 3D model can be adjusted to create a clean cut against a wall, reducing irregularities in the design.
- It's possible to refine the profile of a model by adding rounded edges, providing a more realistic appearance and avoiding a boxy look.
- Empty voids in a model can be effectively capped by modeling a top, then using join geometry to integrate the cap into the original model, creating a seamless design.
So, as I look at this, one of the first things that I'm noticing is that it gets a little odd going back into the wall here. And you can see it's because the sweep is just completely resolving itself at this point where we put the end of the sweep line. If I were to go to Level One here, what I could do is I can actually adjust the sweep.
If I were to say Edit Sweep at this point, I can actually pick the sweep profile and hit the Sketch Path to edit the path. And this may seem a little weird, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to take it and I'm just going to run it out so that it goes beyond this line. This one's going to start exactly where we want it to, but here I want it to go beyond because I'm going to put a void at this location to cut it so that it cuts clean against the wall we just created.
So I will finish the sketch there, finish it one more time, and then you can see that the sweep now goes well beyond. That's obviously not something we want because now we're building way into the wall there, so that's not good. But what I could do is I can go to Create, because I'm still in the bench model here, I can go to Create > Void Forms > Void Extrusion, and I can just create a rectangle extrusion here that is much larger than it needs to be, but I'm going to have it stop at the face of this wall.
With the extrusion drawn in, I just want to make sure it stops here at this point so I can always move it out and then push it back in, and you can see how it highlights the wall. And then I'll just hit Finish Edit Mode, and then what I need to do here is if I go to 3D View, it's hard to see because nothing's really cutting itself, but I can see that my extrusion is here for the void, and if I just move this up vertically, you can see I now have a void form that I could use, and what I want it to do is I want it to cut this element, and so I can still see it going through there, and I can still see this piece at that point. If I go to Cut Geometry, I can select my piece of casework here that we created already, and then the void, if it's not cutting it already, it would actually show up as an option to be a cutting element, and one thing that we can do is as we go in, we can grab this, and to make sure that it's actually cutting it, we can move this around, and you can see that as I move it, it creates a gap there, and so I'll undo, make sure everything's good, and now we can see we have a nice strong profile line up against the wall, and this looks much better already.
The next thing that we'll do is we can refine the profile to have some rounded edges on it so that it looks a little bit more realistic, and so I can go in and I can select the sweep, and then we'll say Edit Sweep, and I can Edit the Profile, and I can actually give this a bit of a rounded edge to it. So I can say Edit Profile, and since we've already got the dimensions established, there's no reason I can't go ahead and do this in 3D. So I'll use this same Fillet Arc tool that we used previously, and I'm just going to round off this edge a bit so that it's a little softer as it makes the turn, and then I can just finish the sketch, and it's a couple boxes there, but you can see that now that we've rounded it off, it looks a little bit more realistic, and we don't have to worry about it looking super boxy anymore.
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The next thing we want to do is we have this kind of strange cap here that's happening, and so we don't want to leave just an empty void in the middle like that, so we're going to do a couple of things to help resolve that issue there. First one is we're going to model essentially a top to this, and so we're still in the same Edit In-Place or Model In-Place family, and so what I could do is I can do Create > Extrusion, and I can set my work point by using Pick Plane, and I can pick the plane which is going to be the top of my bench, and then from there we can use the Pick Lines tool to pick the boundary of this piece, and then we can create our profile that's going to sit on top, and now once we create it, you can see my Extrusion Start and End are set to zero and one foot, and I'm not too worried about that because we always end up going in and adjusting it after the fact anyway, but we'll go ahead and finish the sketch, and you can see it gives us a straight one-foot cap here, and so what I would do is I would adjust that—instead of 12 inches—we'll make it 2 inches and see what that looks like, and maybe we'll go down to 1 inch because we don't need it to be that thick, and now we have a cap over the top that can be used for anything there. If you wanted to refine the geometry a bit, we could do that by using Join Geometry to join these two pieces and make them one, and that'll keep them together within the project after we're done making these edits, and so now you can see we have a bench that's been added in between the open office and the break room areas.
Once you're happy with the way it looks, there's an endless number of edits that we could be doing here. You can go ahead and finish the model, and we can take a look at it again in 3D just to double-check, make sure everything looks the way we want, and of course, always want to save.
