Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by David Watson
Introduction
The object behind this exercise is twofold. Firstly it is to give you practice with some of
the 3D techniques which you have discovered in the tutorials or to introduce you to them if you haven't seen
them before. Secondly it is to demonstrate a reasonably simple method for constructing a convincing 3D tree.
and select "Start from Scratch" from the Create New Drawing dialogue
, to describe the profile of your tree, one for the canopy and
one for the trunk. Make sure that you join the two polylines end to end, use the Endpoint Osnap,
.
Also make sure that the canopy polyline starts at the midpoint of the rectangle top and that the trunk
polyline ends on the rectangle baseline.
9. You have now drawn all of the constructional elements you need. Your screen should now look
something like the illustration on the right. Save your drawing.
11. Make the CANOPY layer current and use the 3DFACE command, Draw Surfaces 3D Face from the
pull-down or
from the toolbar to draw "leaves" on the canopy. Don't draw too many leaves, remember
that they will be multiplied later when you use the ARRAY command and this can make the drawing file
quite large.
Tip: just draw a few leaf shapes and then use the Multiple option of the COPY command
to copy
them. When you have finished, your drawing should look something like the illustration on the right.
13. Start the ARRAY command, Modify Array from the pull-down or
from the Modify toolbar. Select
all of the leaves when prompted and then select the Polar array option. Pick the midpoint of the rectangle
base when prompted for the centre point of the array (this may be easier if the TRUNK layer is turned off
first), alternatively you could enter the co-ordinate value 0,0 since you know this to be the same point.
Enter the number of items, even numbers look best (say 6 or 8). Do not enter a large number, AutoCAD
is likely to crash and you may lose your work. Accept the defaults for start angle, 360 degrees and to
rotate objects as they are copied. Your canopy will be generated.
You may find that the tree doesn't look quite right and that there are gaps in the
canopy. If this is the case just go through the process again and use a different leaf pattern or add more leaves.
There are lots of ways that you can refine this process to improve the look of the tree. For example you could
draw leaves on three different layers and give each layer a slightly different colour to increase the tonal range. By
changing the colour of the leaf layers you can hint at seasonal changes. You could draw leaves on both halves of
the canopy so that the tree doesn't look too symmetrical when viewed face-on. The key is to experiment. The
illustration on the right shows a tree with a conical shape.
Once you are quite happy with your tree and you have saved it you can use it as a block insert in any other
drawing. You can do this by using the DDINSERT command, Insert Block from the pull-down menu when in
another drawing. The insert base point of this block will be the base of the tree trunk because you drew the tree
with the co-ordinate system origin (0,0) in that location.
If you do decide to keep your tree for future use it is worth tidying the drawing up a little. For example, you don't
need to have the construction lines any longer, so erase all of the objects on the "CONSTRUCTION" layer. Once
you have done that you can also remove the layer itself using the Layers command or the PURGE command, see
the "Object Properties" tutorial for details. This is good drawing practice.