Path Extrude - Page 11

Now that I have a spoon, I feel like having a cup of coffee to stir. I made a cup using the lathe tool, just like the milk bottle. Now it's time to add a handle. I would like to have a basically cylindrical piece of material that forms the shape of a handle and is stuck onto the side of the cup, just like on a real handmade cup. You could extrude a square piece in the correct profile shape and try to bevel it to be round, but that method would be imprecise, time consuming, and worst of all, uncool. The path extrude tool is better suited to this challenge. The idea of path extrude is that you take two components, a 2D shape and a path, and combine them. The goal is to extrude the shape along the path, so that it follows its curves, corners, and so on.

1. First make your coffee cup, using the same method as we used for the milk bottle.

2. Change the active grid to either the x-or z-axis, depending on which side of the cup you want to have a handle. (Figure 20-12 shows the z-axis as active.) Draw the circle to be extruded and the path.

3. Select the path extrude tool. This will be in the extensions palette, probably the first thing on the left in the Tools tab.
   
   
   
   Figure 20.12 Extruding a circle along a path to make a mug handle
   
   

   

4. Drag from the circle to the path. When both of them are highlighted with a red bounding box, release the mouse button. Depending on your processor's speed, and other factors, your PC may have to think for a moment; but you will eventually get a cylinder that has been bent into the shape of our path. The following illustration shows what my first try looked like.

5. You can see that my handle isn't quite right. I really didn't do this on purpose — it's hard to imagine what a path-extruded shape is going to look like. The good thing is that you can still change the original path. If you select Modeling | Reshape (CTRL- L) with the cup handle selected, you can edit your path as if you never did the path extrude. When you end reshape mode, the cup handle will reflect your changes.

Polygon Mesh — Gravity

I made some eggs to go with our scene. Since eggs are made up of spheres in nature, it didn't take much imagination, as you can see here:

The problem with these eggs is that the whites make up a perfectly elliptical egg mass— not a likely scenario. You would have a hard time convincing anyone that these are eggs, even in a cartoon setting and even with good textures. The easy solution we are going to use is the gravity feature available with a polygon mesh in reshape mode.

1. Make some eggs using the sphere primitive, following the example of the egg image here.

2. Select the whites and convert to a gradient mesh by selecting Modeling | Convert.

3. Double-click on the point move tool to get the following dialog; then select Low.
   

4. Select a point and move it to give the whites the shape you want. Surrounding vertices in the gradient mesh, responding to the gravity, move along with the point you selected. I indented the area between the yolks on either side to match my conception of ideal fried eggs, which you can see below. I also nudged up the bottom row of vertices, in case I decided to have the eggs lie flat on a plate.

If you are low on time, patience, or even talent, the gravity feature can serve as an easy alternative to Bézier or polygon-level modeling. It will probably never get you the exact results you want, but it is easy and fast.

Bézier Surface - Page 10
Macromedia Flash 5 Developer's Guide
Meta Ball - Page 12