From the course: AutoCAD for Mac 2020 Essential Training

Modifying 3D objects - AutoCAD for Mac Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD for Mac 2020 Essential Training

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Modifying 3D objects

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- [Instructor] There are a number of modifying tools that are unique to working with 3D models. Three of the more important ones are called Boolean operations named Subtract, Union and Intersect. These allow you to combine and remove 3D models to and from other 3D models in order to create more complex shapes. Here, I have eight objects in four pairs. Each is a box with a sphere placed on the corner. So, for the first tool, we're going to use the Subtract tool. Now with the Subtract tool, the order that you select the objects in is most critical. I'll find the tool here. And reading the command prompt, I'm asked to select the solids, surfaces or regions to subtract from. I'm going to go ahead and choose my box, and press Return. Now I'm asked to select the solids, surfaces or regions to subtract. I'm going to go ahead and select my sphere here. I'm going to zoom in just a little bit and then press Return. We can see that the mass that overlap the two models has been removed. In this case, the box remains minus the area that the sphere overlaps. We're going to try this again in reverse with the next pair of objects. So, again, Subtract, but this time I'm going to select the sphere first, press Return, grab the box, and press Return again. Now, if we orbit around a little bit, we can see that it's actually removed the mass of the box from the sphere. For the Union and Intersect tools, the order that we select the objects in does not affect the outcome. I'm going to select the Union option first. Grab my two objects and press Return. And now we can see I have a single 3D solid. Also note that when I select the object, as well as these over here, I do not have nearly the amount of grips that I had when these were still solid primitives. Because the shape is more complex than a simple solid primitive, we do not have the same editing options with all of the grips. Now the last command that we have is Intersect. I'll select the tool, select both of my objects and press Return. And we can see that I'm left only with the area that overlapped by both objects. But to really see the power of this tool, I'm going to pan over and I want to use the profiles that we see here. I've got a side profile of a bracket and then a top view of that same bracket. We're going to start by extruding the plan view, including all of the circles. So I should have five objects total here. I'll press Return. And now I can extrude these up. I'm going to type in a value of, let's say, two and press Return. Now, I need to remove the four circles here. So I'm going to go up to the Subtract tool here, select the base view here as my original object. And then for the regions to subtract, I'm going to use a selection window to grab just the four holes and press Return. Now I can extrude the side profile, press Return, and I can make sure that it goes and passes all the way through a top view. Now, I'll use the Intersect tool. Grab both objects and press Return. We can see that this shape would have been much harder to model without using the Intersect tool. We can use some other commands that we're already familiar with like Fillet and Chamfer as well. I'm going to move back over here to one of my shapes. I'm going to go to the Drafting tool set and come down to the Modify panel and find the Fillet command here. I'm going to give this a radius of 0.5. And then I'm going to select one of the edges here. It asked me to confirm the radius. I'm just going to go ahead and hit Return. It asked me if I want to select any additional edges. I'm going to go ahead and select this one here and then press Return. We can see that it applied that Fillet to my model. There are some other commands that are altered slightly to make them more 3D friendly. Most of them are found under the Modeling tab, here, under the Modify panel. These are commands like 3D Move or 3D Mirror. In the normal Mirror command, you're asked to select two points to mirror the objects around a line or an axis. In 3D Mirror, you must select three points to create a plane to mirror your objects around. So I'm going to select the tool, select my objects here and press Return. I'm going to orbit around just a little bit. And I'm going to use the wedge tool here, that plane, in order to pick my three points. So I'll pick this point here, this point here, and this point here. I'm asked if I want to delete the source objects. I'm going to go ahead and say no. And we can see that it's created the mirror of my object here. Lastly, if you notice when we select an object, we get this sort of UCS looking icon here over top of the object. This is called the Move gizmo. What it allows you to do is move an object along a specific axis or plane. Simply move your cursor over one of the axis, and we can see that it highlights gold. This will lock you into that axis, simply by clicking on it and then dragging your cursor. In this case, I'm going to select the blue axis and then start to drag my cursor. We can see that it's locked me in to the blue or the Z axis right now. I'm going to drag this up a little bit and then type in a value of two and press Return. Over on the Modify panel, we can see that we actually have a bunch of different gizmos that we can use. In addition to Move, we have a Rotate, Scale or the option for No Gizmo. I will say that most of the time, I tend to use Move and the Rotate gizmos. So for Rotate, just like the other gizmo, we're given three axis that we can lock ourselves into. But in this version, it's for the purpose of rotating our object. I can type in a specific value like 90 and press Return. So using the gizmos, in addition to your other 3D Modify tools, you should be able to create any 3D object that you need to.

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