Understanding 3D Surfaces

So far in this book, you’ve worked with 3D solids and meshes. A third type of 3D object called a surface completes AutoCAD’s set of 3D modeling tools to make AutoCAD 2011 a complete 3D modeling application in its own right.

Click the Surface tab and you’ll see the Surface panels that offer the tools you’ll need to work with surface modeling (Figure 25-34).

In the Create tab, you see quite a few new tools, but a handful should look familiar. The Loft, Sweep, Extrude, and Revolve tools at the far left of the Create panel are tools you’ve seen in previous chapters. These surface creation tools work in the same way as the tools of the same name in the Solid tab. In fact, they are the essentially the same tools. They just use a different command option to create a surface instead of a solid. The big difference is that to create a solid, you need to start with a closed polyline. With the surface version of the Loft, Sweep, Extrude, and Revolve tools, you can start with an open spline, polyline, or other object. And even if you do use a closed object, such as a circle or closed polyline, you will s....Figure 25-35