Blade Tutorial      by Barry Christian As I mentioned in my last article, boat hulls and knife blades gave me particular problems when I first approached them to model them. This is my second tutorial on modelling in trueSpace. This one covers the knife blade. You can download the TSD files from my website by clicking one of these two versions; blade3.tsd for trueSpace 3 or blade4.tsd for trueSpace 4. Once you download the tutorial, play it by choosing play tutorial from the help menu, and then selecting the tsd file from where you saved it. Once this is complete, come back and follow along as I explain the steps in more detail. As before, trueSpace TSD files are quirky and if it doesn't look like what you read here, don't worry, you can learn it from the article alone.   Getting Started First we setup our screen to prepare for this model. For this model I like the main view set to perspective , and two additional views, front , and top . Side could replace front in this, it doesn't particularly matter.   Start With the Cylinder Primitive This caused a lot of thought. I felt a lot like the character from Monty Python who said "my brain hurts". I tried all kinds of things. I tried a cube and took off a face by welding the vertices of two corner edges, but then I had a nice blade that didn't go to a point. I tried the spline tool and that would work too, but took a lot more time. Still it is a viable alternative, just not my favorite. You may like the other way better. To each, his own. I decided that I liked the cylinder tool best, because it gave me the basic shape quickly and then I could move some edges around to get the shape I wanted. If I was modelling a specific blade for accuracy, the spline method would probably work best. Figure 1 shows the cylinder after I stretched it to the basic shape of a blade. Next Page   Tutorials Index