Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie the last of the Spline Modeler Section, we'll take a look at working with Compound Paths and a cool little trick where we explore some of the Cross Section options to disconnect Cross Sections from one another. Let's go ahead and create something that we could use for a house Ð a wall with a door and some windows. I'm going to split my view so that we can see the Directors Camera view, but we can also zoom into the Front for our drawing. I'll change this Top Camera to the Front Camera, and we'll zoom in a little bit. I'll select my Drawing Tool up here and in this case I'm not going to click and drag to get those nice Bezier Handles for smooth corners, I'm simply going to click and release. We won't see anything in the Front View until it fills in and the shape's completed, but we will see updates in our Directors Camera View. I'll click once, I'll move to the other side of my View opening here, and I'll hold the Shift key down to get a perfectly horizontal line and click. I'll move down using the Grid as a reference, click again, I'll move over, click, and just repeat this process until I get a wall with a door in it. I'll move over to the last point in the line, click, and it automatically closes the shape. I'm going to change to my Move Tool here real quickly so I can grab this last node on the Extrusion Path and we can make our wall a little bit narrower now. Well, if we want to add a window to this, the easiest way is to come up to the Square Drawing Tool and draw our window. Now, you notice nothing changes here and that's because we need to invoke a special function of Carrara called Compound Paths. So I will select both drawn shapes here by doing Command-A on the Macintosh, Control-A on the PC. Both those shapes are selected. We come to a Range, Combine as Compound Path. Carrara now considers this a single shape, so you can draw additional shapes if you want to in this scene, but if you want to add more windows you need to go ahead and Ungroup, or break apart the compound. I'll do that, it fills back in and now I can go ahead and draw my second window. I'll Select All in the scene, Arrange, Combine as Compound. Now we've got our two windows. What if we needed a front and back wall to a building and we wanted them to line up perfectly, kind of like the infamous nickname shotgun houses where if you shoot a shotgun in the front door it goes out the back door. Let me show you a little trick with disconnecting Cross Sections. I'm going to make this a Single View now. I clicked in this Top View to make it active, we go to Single Ð I have to zoom in a little bit Ð I will select this end point in my Extrusion Path, click it, hold the Shift key and drag it out. We now have a very thick wall. I'm going to convert this last point, since it's selected, into a Cross Section by: Sections, Create. Coming back to this first point, or first Cross Section, I'll just click on the Cross Section to activate it. I'm going to come to Sections, Create Multiple. I'm going to add two more Cross Sections. There's two, I'll select OK. We can see those appear inside of our shape right now. If we rotate around we can still see through it. I'm going to highlight the Extrusion Path here, select that one point, click on it, hold the Shift key and drag this one wall close to the next one. I'll repeat this process for that third wall and get it close to the other one. I'm going to highlight this Cross Section by clicking on it. You can rotate and see that. I'm going to come up to Sections, Cross Section Options, and I'm going to choose to Disconnect it from the Cross Section and I'll show you what happens if we don't engage Fill Cross Section. It's going to disconnect right away and we've got two walls showing up but we can see the inside of the wall. We need to fill that and that's what that other option's for under Cross Section Options, we'll choose to Fill Cross Section. We have a couple of other options down here for Skinning when you've got different kinds of shapes. Remember our cog wheel exercise? We can change how that plays with round circles going to a cog wheel, Skin Point to Point, and then there's Shape Point to Point, changes how Carrara thinks about connecting those shapes together. You'll have to experiment with that to see which is the best one in your solution. But now with Fill Cross Section highlighted, and Disconnect Cross Section, I'll select OK. We have a solid wall right here. I can move to the next Cross Section: Sections, Next, and I'll come to Cross Section Options, and simply choose Fill Cross Section, and we don't need to disconnect it at this time, and that's filled up. So we have two walls that match perfectly, but it's a single object, single shape. We go back into our Assembly Room, we see it there, we can do our quick Area Render; that's how easy it is to work with Compound Shapes in Carrara. In our next movie we'll begin the exploration of the Vertex Modeler.