Rhino FS2 Tutorial

<2.2 - Fixing Mistakes>

You're probably wondering what mistake, right? Well, I'll be honest - it was not an intentional one. I really did make a mistake, without meaning to, and when I caught it I had already taken the screenshots for the previous page. So I decided to use the oppourtunity to show exactly why you should start off a model with a polyline skeleton.

Well, here it is. When positioning the hourglass-like outline of the model from the top viewing port, I misplaced one of its "kinks", as Rhino refers to them. Call them corners, points, whatever... Do you see it? We need to reposition that kink without moving the rest of the line. Piece o' cake.

See this button? This will toggle the Edit Points mode for any selected polylines. Left-click turns it on, right-click turns it off. You can click on this button either before or after you've selected the polyline; if you click it before it will simply ask you to pick the line you want to turn Edit Points on for. Pick the polyline, and click the button. Walla!

You now see that the polyline has little squares, called points, every place it has a kink.

<TotM - 3D Positioning> Rhino makes 3D manipulation easy. First of all, the X axis is left-right, Y is front-back, and Z is up-down. Depending on which viewport you're working in, you can move something in any direction and it will only move along 2 axes. If you are in the Top viewport, dragging an object down and to the left will move it along the "ground" - the X and Y axes. If you want to position a point at a certain height along the Z-axis from the top viewport, CTRL-click at the X-Y location. It's location will be set at those X-Y coordinates, but you will be able to dynamically move it along the Z axis. Once it is place, click again.

You can move these points freely in 3D space, and they will remain connected to their neighbors on either side. For now, work in the top viewport. Select the misplaced point, and only the misplaced point. Make sure that "Snap" is still active down bottom, and drag the point one grid square to the right. It should now be aligned with the "cross-section" polyline and intersecting it.

In the perspective viewport, right-drag the view around to make sure that the mistake is fixed, and also that no other mistakes snuck in on us. If you find any more, fix 'em the same way.

Now that we've got the basic shape down, let's start building faces. :)