Subtitles of the Movie

So now we're going to go ahead and look at some of the ways that you can utilize these Sandbox Tools with your regular hard-surface type geometry. What I've done here is I've created a couple domes and a nice box here that I just moved around the polygons just to make it a little bit more irregular. Now, the very first thing that you should know and probably the most useful tool out of the Sandbox when it comes to other tools, is the Drape Tool. The Stamp Tool isn't going to really do what you want it to do with regular type geometry because it really works best with triangles. However, the Drape Tool works fantastically well. It's important to note though that these have to be made into groups before you do that. If you don't make them into groups, you won't get the right result. So make them into groups, go ahead and get the Drape Tool, click, click, very nice, click, click, very nice. So you can see how useful the Drape Tool is just to project shapes onto, especially these curved shapes which can be very difficult to draw those types of things out, text and those types of things can be very useful here. Now, aside from that, we also have the ability to actually sculpt, particularly on these denser type surfaces like spheres and arcs and stuff like this. Now notice that I selected everything before I started. That's not the way you want to start. You want to start with a relatively small smooth and you want to go ahead and click. Right now I'm at four inches and I'm just going to go ahead and start clicking and dragging and you can see here that while not perfect and there are some artifacts because of the density of detail near the middle, I do have the ability to do some sculpting and of course if I hold down the Shift Key, I can pull out in that tangent direction just like I could if I was working on a regular tin of the Sandbox but this will work just fine with non-tin, meaning non-triangulated faces, you know, like these that are more rectangular in their nature and, of course, you can see that very clearly if you go View, Hidden Geometry. Now, it automatically breaks them down into more triangular faces when they're not going to fit right but they started out life as more rectangular objects. That is your two major ways that you can utilize the Sandbox Tools in conjunction with your hard-surface geometry. There really aren't too many opportunities to go ahead and use the Flip Edge Tool or the Add Detail Tool. The Drape Tool and the Smooth Tool are your primary two best bets. Now, the last thing that I do want to talk about is this issue of symmetrical modeling and what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and open up a brand-new document. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go ahead and grab and create a new From Scratch piece of geometry here and that will be too big. Something like so and what I'm immediately going to do is I'm going to go ahead and select that and make it a component. Now that I've got it a component, I'm going to select it again, say Copy and then I'm going to grab the Scale Tool and I'm simply going to pull it to a negative one, negative one just like so. I'm going to say Edit, Paste in Place. So now I have a copy of itself pasted next to itself. Now if I enter into that and I begin to use the Smooth Tool and I'll go back to something like say five feet here. Eh, maybe not that big; maybe four feet. Yeah, that'll look better. Go ahead and start working with this. You'll see that now we have the ability of doing a symmetrical sculpt and this can be a great timesaver when you're doing things that are going to be symmetrical like faces or anything where you're going to have two sides of the same thing going at one time. So just bear in mind that the Sandbox Tools can be used exactly the same way as any other components where you can flip them and do symmetrical modeling. So that is how you can incorporate these tools into your regular modeling as well as using them for your standard terrain type modeling.