Setting up your environment

1. Choose Preferences > Menus > Long Menus or + 3 (Windows) or + 3 (Mac) to ensure Alias is displaying all the 3D menus.
2. Choose Preferences > Construction Options to set your working units. In this example, we set the Main Units to cm and turn on Reset Grids.

   

3. Choose Construction > Grid Preset from the tool palette. Turn on Labels if you want to see grid labels. Make sure Grid Spacing is set to 10.0 so grids are drawn every 10 cm.

   

4. Zoom out your view or resize your window to be able to see the grid from -100 to +100 along the horizontal axis, and -120 to +120 along the vertical axis.
5. Choose Layers > New to create a working geometry layer. Make it active by clicking on it (the button will be drawn in yellow).
6. With the Left modeling window active, select Symmetry from the horizontal layers bar. (Click on the active layer button to display the menu).

   We want the front view of the car to be symmetric across the center line (Z axis). Layer symmetry will automatically reflect the curves and create shape objects as we draw curves. This means this geometry layer will now automatically create curves across the Z axis.

7. Make the Left window full screen.

Using Automatic shape creation options

1. Choose Preferences > Workflows > Paint to turn on 2D paint menus.
2. In the Global Auto-shape section of the Paint Control Panel, choose Image(outline) from the Type menu. The system will now draw shape outlines every time a new curve is created.
3. In the Shape Outline options section in the Paint Control Panel, set the Style to Solid Brush, Opacity to 1, and Width to 4.
4. Open the Curves > Blend Curve Toolboxand choose the Keypoint Curve Tools > Lines > Line tool. Place the first point at 0,0,0 and the second point at 0, 90 cm, 0. Notice how the shape is automatically drawn on the left side of the construction plane. Using the object information window you can adjust the line length to accurately define half the width of the car.

   

5. Select the Line tool again and draw another line to define the height: 0, 0, 112 cm.
   NoteYou might need to zoom out your view to see the whole lines.

   

6. Select both lines and adjust the width of the shape outline. I.e make these construction lines 2 pixels wide (Width set to 2.0). This will also modify the width of future construction lines that you place in the image.
7. Open the Blend curve toolbox from the Curves palette, choose Blend curve create and use curve snap to snap the first point to the top of the vertical line you created earlier. Continue drawing the windscreen profile. Notice that as you draw on one side of the symmetry plane, the system draws the curve and the shape on the other side.

   

   

8. Use the blend curve tools to edit the curve and add constraints as required. For example, the center point requires a tangent constraint to ensure the curve is flat across the line of symmetry.

   

9. Continue to create additional blend curves to define the front view. Make sure you use curve snap for curves that intersect so a curve relationship/constraint is automatically created.

   

10. Now select the curves you want to make wider and modify the Shape Outline Width.
11. You may also want to remove the outline from the first horizontal & vertical lines. These were created as guide curves to establish the correct width & height of the car.

    

12. At this point you may wish to evaluate the quality of each curve created using the Alias curve curvature tools.

    

13. At any time you can toggle off the geometry curves using F12 or WindowDisplay > Toggles > Model .
14. If you are working in an environment with 1:1 projection capabilities or you want to print your tape drawing at a larger scale, you may want to increase the resolution of the canvas plane. All shape curves will automatically update when the canvas plane resolution is changed.
15. Our canvas plane resolution is 1109 * 770 pixels, which if printed at 150ppi would result in an image printed on paper of approximately 7” x 5” without any image scaling.

    

Changing Canvas Plane Resolution

1. First, dolly out to see the canvas plane and enough space around it to be able to see the edges of the new canvas plane.

   

2. Open Canvas > Resize Canvas ❒ to open the Resize Canvas Control window. Adjust the canvas Width to 2000 pixels and the Height to 1800 pixels.

   

3. The canvas plane by default enlarges from the center of the canvas plane. The blue dashed line shows the new canvas plane size.

   

4. We need to scale the canvas plane to suit the size of the curves we have drawn earlier. First choose the canvas plane in the Construction Plane Editor. Then choose Canvas > Resize Canvas and drag the corner selection handle to increase the size of the canvas plane to be large enough to encompass all curves. Notice that the shapes automatically re-render to a new image resolution every time the canvas plane is transformed.

   

5. The canvas plane is still a little too tall. Choose Paint > Select > Marquee (rectangle) and select the area of the canvas plane to keep.

   

6. Now choose Canvas > Crop to Marquee to reduce the canvas plane size. Note the marquee tool and crop can also be used to make a canvas plane larger.

   

7. Notice the shape outline now look much smaller because the canvas plane resolution has changed. Adjust the width of each shape curve to suit the new resolution.
8. The image below now has a canvas plane resolution of 2000 x 1325 pixels, which prints approximately 13.25” x 8.75” @ 150ppi. Alias supports canvas plane resolution up to 6000 pixels and also support bi-linear image scaling during the printing process so much larger images can be printed.

   

   NoteIncreasing the canvas plane size is a good idea for presenting images at larger sizes, but note that the system memory requirements dramatically increase, printing will take longer, and brush strokes become slower. A careful balance needs to be established between image resolution and system speed.

Printing

Lets assume you now want to print your tape drawing at ¼ scale. A number of options need to be set before your can make a successful print.

1. First choose File > Print Setup and on the Output tab, choose a printer; in this example, we will print on a large format roll feed printer using the output postscript print language.

   

2. Next, on the Paper tab, select the paper type, paper standard, paper size and orientation.

   

3. In this example, we require the typical title box and engineering information in the bottom left corner of the paper.

   

4. Next, we define what views we want to see on the paper. In this example we want to see a single view layout and we want to specify a specific print scale.

   

   Note the active window is used by default to create a single view layout.

5. Now it’s time to select the print menu command to open the preview window.

   

   The print preview window shows dotted line pages. At a scale of 1:1, this image requires 9 pages of A0 size paper.

6. Modify the Page Display State in this preview window to display each page with paper margins. This option makes it clear to understand what will be printed on each page.

   

   NoteYou can use standard Alias view modifier keys ( + + (Windows) or + + (Mac)) in the preview window to adjust exactly how the image will be positioned on the paper.
7. After considering this image for a bit, we decide that what we really want is a single piece of paper at 1:4 (25%) scale. In the print setup window Viewing tab, change the Scale to 1:4.

   

8. See how the Print Preview window has changed to display a single page.

   

9. Now click the Print button to print your image.

Adding Simple Texture To a Tape Drawing

When creating a tape drawing, designers often add solid color and texture to improve the appearance of the image. In this example we will use the Make Shape tool to add this detail.

1. Load in your tape drawing file you created earlier. In our example, the main tape curves have been created and additional curves that define the wheels, headlights, and grill detailing have been placed with a thinner line.

   

   At the moment the additional curve detailing is assigned to the default 3D geometry layer, so we need to create new symmetry layers and assign the geometry to them.

2. Choose Preferences > Workflows > Modeling to make all modeling tools available.
3. Choose Layers > New to create a new geometry layer. A geometry layer will be added to the horizontal bar. Double click the new layer and type a name, for example, Headlights.
4. Repeat this step and name the next layer Tires; repeat again and name the next Grill. The Grill geometry layer should be the active layer (drawn in yellow).
5. Using Pick > Object select the curves that define the grill detailing and assign them to the Grill layer using the Grill layer drop-down menu.

   

6. Using the same menu, turn on Symmetry for this layer and notice how the curves are reflected across the center line.
7. Choose Paint > Shape > Make Image Shape and select the curves that define the center grill. Note you need only select one half of the grill curves.

   

8. Click the Accept button. After the curves are accepted a shape object is created and the paint parameters adjusted.

   

9. In this example, we want to create a small vertical grill effect, so click on the Map button next to RGB Color in the Shape Fill options of the Paint Panel to open the Shape Texture window.
10. Click the Bulge texture.

    

11. Adjust the Uscale & Vscale bulge parameters .

    

12. Repeat this process for the outer grill detailing.

    

13. Follow the same procedure to assign the Grid texture to the tires. Set the Vwidth to 0 so the grid displays as vertical lines.

    

Congratulations! You’ve now completed a tape drawing using Alias.