Boat Hull Tutorial      by Barry Christian One of the things I had a hard time modelling was a boat hull. Specifically a canoe hull. After this tutorial, I hope you can say, "Why would you have a problem with that? Its easy." If that happens, then I have done my job. One of the reasons I had this problem was that I tried to build everything from primitives. Some things just aren't suited well to that. A boat hull is one of those things. Because of this, I needed to learn how to use the polygon tool and the sweep tools better.   Getting Started To begin with, you can download and watch the trueSpace TSD file or "tutorial" file and play it. The file is canoe3.tsd for trueSpace3 or canoe4.tsd if you are using trueSpace4 and can be downloaded by clicking one or the other. You may have to right-click it and choose "save as". After you have downloaded it, you can play it by choosing "play tutorial" from the help menu  and choosing the file from wherever you saved it. Watch this tutorial and read the demo text prompts. When you are done with that, come back to this tutorial. I didn't do the boolean operation because I couldn't get it to playback properly. If you have ever made a TSD, you know that you get "one shot" and that's it. So I tried it four times and finally gave up on it. The last part, including the boolean subtraction part, is still in this article. Also, please note that on the ts3 version of the TSD, activate the "snap to grid icon" first before playing the TSD. And although I tested both TSDs I have noticed that there is a problem getting consistency in playing TSDs. If something doesn't look quite right, this article should still help you understand what the images should look like even if they are distorted somewhat in the TSD.   Setup your Screen and Tools To begin with, we will setup our screen to the best advantage or vantage you might say to create this model. I prefer the main view set to Top with two additional views, perspective, and front. You can see this setup in figure 1(next page). Then we begin the model with the spline tool. First, right-click the spline tool to bring up the spline tool's properties panel, then left-click it to bring up the main panel. It is probably a good idea to use the grid. I selected 0.1 in each axis for my grid. This allowed me to keep it in the small part of the screen I was using. You set the grid by right-clicking the icon for the grid to set the values in its properties panel and then left-clicking it to activate it. You will notice it is now grey. Next Page   Tutorials Index