Learning AliasStudio Tutorials Modeling a Vacuum Cleaner > Setting the View Window Names

Modeling a Vacuum Cleaner

Learning Objectives

In this lesson you will build a hand-held car vacuum cleaner. This lesson introduces you to more surface building techniques. You'll learn how to:

Create swept surfaces
Trim off the excess areas of surfaces
Create rounded edges
Use Layers to organize complex models

Modeling Workflow

In this tutorial you will use a modeling technique called overbuilding and trimming. With this technique, you will create simple swept surfaces to define the main shape of the design. You will then combine these surfaces using intersecting and trimming.

As the vacuum cleaner design is symmetrical, you will save time by only building and detailing one half of the model. When the design is complete, you will copy and mirror the surfaces to create the full model.

The workflow you'll use to create the vacuum cleaner model is shown below:

First you will create the main surfaces, and then intersect and trim them to create the body shape. Throughout the tutorial, you will build one half of the vacuum cleaner, and at the end you will mirror the surfaces to create the completed model.

Then you will fillet the surfaces and add design details, further trimming the main shape.

New tools used in this tutorial

Pick > Object Types > Curve on surf
Pick > Template
Object Edit > Patch Precision
Surfaces > Swept surfaces > Rail surface
Surfaces > Surface fillet
Surface Edit > Create CurvesOnSurface > Intersect
Surface Edit > Trim

New menu items used in this tutorial

Object Display > Template

Setting the View Window Names

Before you begin this tutorial, you may need to adjust preferences to show tutorial window names.

Choose File > New.

If the four windows are named Top, Left, Back and Perspective, you'll need to change a setting for this tutorial.

Open Preferences > General Preferences to the Model Windows section, and click to place a check mark beside Use Tutorial Window Names.



Click Go.

This changes the names of the Left and Back windows to Front[Left] and Right[Back]. We'll be using the names that are outside the square brackets. These are names traditionally associated with DesignStudio and Studio; AliasStudio is moving the names of these windows to the names in brackets, however, this tutorial still uses the older DesignStudio window names.

This option requires that you exit AliasStudio and restart the application before continuing with the tutorial, so choose File > Exit and then start the application again.