Tutorials
Rhino: My Way
I’ve created a collection of viewing modes, preferences, tool bars, and templates to help make Rhino easier to use. Here’s the deal:
You don’t have to work with me for long before learning that I’m not exactly a “Rhino guy.” In fact, I’ve traditionally pretty much hated Rhino. Why waste time on useless data that can’t be changed, when you could be building with a parametric app?
Well, I figured that the answer to that question can only be learned by doing. I’ve never really learned Rhino well because I’ve always been so frustrated by it, so I attended a Rhino training course at McNeal Miami this week, and though the class itself was very basic, the opportunity to spend time in the software was very helpful to me.
One of the most frustrating things about Rhino, I find, is that there are far too many tools. It’s not a good thing: they’d be better off having one powerful “extrude” command than the twelve various commands they have now.
My way of getting around this was to create toolbars that organize the tools in a much cleaner, easier-to-read way. I hate dealing with cryptic icons, though they are helpful at a glance, so I like to use both text and icons to get the best of both worlds. I’ve also added some custom tools, like X Y and Z flavors of the “mirror” and “setpt” commands, making them much faster to use in daily practice.
One toolbar change I made that is bound to stir up controversy is the removal of all right-click functions on “top-level” tools, or tools that have popup menus beneath them. This makes it much quicker to access nested tools, and much more predictable. The right-click functions are all still available in the resulting pop-up menus.
I’ve used F1, F2, and F3 to change CPlane orientations on the fly while in perspective mode.
I also really dislike the default visualization modes in Rhino. I quickly found that it’s not Rhino itself that’s the problem, it’s just the way it’s configured that’s the problem. I’ve created some custom view modes that work better for me, based on “Material” rather than layer color. I find it makes organizing the file much easier.
The one thing these lack as of today are all of my custom scripts, which I’ll have to add to this distro at a later date. More to come soon!
Illustrator: Shoe Rendering
Lets explore some advance AI techniques to make rendering products super simple. Shoes are really easy to render in Illustrator, and I’ve had a special request to show some shoe design techniques, so check out the final image and lets get crackin’.
Illustrator: Sketching
You might have figured out by now that I use AI for most of my 2D rendering these days. But what about sketching? I admit that I don’t use it all the time, but increasingly frequently I’m finding that sketching in Illustrator can actually be extremely effective for very fast, clean, EDITABLE, scalable thumbnails. Here are a few of my tricks.
Illustrator: ID Template
adam_seed.zip
This is the beginnings of a library of Industrial Design graphic styles, brush presets, swatches, and symbols for your convenience in Adobe Illustrator sketching and rendering.
I’m hoping to expand this with time for my own use, so I figured I’d make them available to the public. It’s just a start, but hopefully it will be more useful as I expand. If you come up with any good ones, send them over to me and I’ll add them into the library. Enjoy!
Creating Textures 1
Believe it or not, the above image has only two shapes: the logo, and the background. All of the texturing and 3D effects are created in the appearance palette, making this incredibly flexible when it comes time to make edits to the original geometry.
Illustrator CS3:
The appearance palette.
Lets take a closer look at the appearance palette and revisit the old “symbols” trick for those who missed it.
Update: Eureka! I was just shown something I should have figured out for myself: you can change the color of a symbol just by using the appearance palette (no need for the boolean trick I’ve recommended in the past!).