Introduction
Swift 3D's Scene Editor, the Extrusion Editor, and the Lathe Editor are simple 3D modelling tools that serve their purpose well, but the Advanced Modeler is where you really harness the power of this application. What makes the Advanced Modeler powerful is that is allows you to edit your 3D objects at the mesh level, where you control the properties of individual vertices, edges, and faces.
In the Scene Editor, you can stretch and scale a cube to make it a rectangle. In the Advanced Modeler, you can add faces to the cube and extrude them to create a mult-tiered staircase. In the Extrusion Editor, you can outline an elongated ellipse to create the basic shape of a leaf. In the Advanced Modeler, you can smooth and reshape that extrusion and turn it into a natural, ribbed leaf with a stem and little piece missing from where a caterpillar nibbled on it. Is it as powerful as Maya or 3DS MAX? Of course not, but for the $250 price tag you definitely get more than your money's worth.
Many Swift 3D users are highly proficient at using the Scene, Extrusion, and Lathe editors, but are somewhat bewildered by the Advanced Modeler. This is because the interface and functionality of the Advanced Modeler is very different from its three counterparts. To use it effectively requires an understanding of a new suite of terminology, and a new way of looking at the 3D modelling process. This guide will familiarize you with the terminology, tools, and processes of the Swift 3D Advanced Modeler, and help give you a jump start into modelling complex, organic shapes that are far beyond anything that could be achieved with a primitive, extrusion, or lathe.
Taking an Object from the Scene Editor to the Advanced Modeler
It's time to get familiar with the Swift 3D Advanced Modeler. Open Swift 3D, and while you're still in the Scene Editor go ahead and click on the Box primitive.
That will put a Box primitive in your scene. Now look over on the left panel where the "Box" line is highlighted, and go down to the Segmentation subsection. Turn up the Segmentation of this box to 8 for all three attributes: width, height, and depth.
What Segmentation refers to is the number of faces that will comprise each axis of the object. With the box set to 8 x 8 x 8 segmentation, that gives you 512 faces to work with. That's plenty of mesh complexity to work with to get familiar with the Advanced Modeler interface.
Alright, we've got the model we're going to mess with. Now it's time to head to the Advanced Modeler. In the top panel, click that dreaded fourth tab.
Interface Tour
When you arrive in the Advanced Modeler, you'll see four viewports, unlike the two viewports that are offered in the Scene Editor. By default, the Advanced Modeler's viewports are Left, Front, Top, and Perspective. With the default settings, the Left, Front, and Top viewports will display the mesh as a wireframe, while the Perspective Viewport will display the mesh with shading in various colors depending on the current selection. We'll get to that selection part later. In the Perspective Viewport, you'll see the box we just created at a 3/4 view perspective, shaded in a light blue color. The 8 x 8 x 8 segmentation is clearly visible when you look at it in this form.
At this point, we are still looking at this box at the object level. The only properties that we can manipulate are object-level properties such as position, scale, and rotation. We want to edit this box at the mesh level, and completely change how it is shaped. When editing at the mesh level, you manipulate the properties of individual vertices, edges, faces, and surface groups. Surface groups are simply groups of faces that will move together and share the same material. We'll get into that more later.
To open up the functions of the Advanced Modeler and start editing this box at the mesh level, we have to push the magic button. In the top Toolbar, click the Edit Mesh button.
When you press the Edit Mesh button, you get a warning prompt. All it's telling you is that once you convert this object to an editable mesh, you can no longer edit its typical object-level properties. In the case of a box, that refers pretty much just to segmentation. We don't care about segmentation anymore, though, we're editing the mesh now, real deal Holyfield. Just click OK.
As soon as you click Yes on the warning prompt, our Box model turns orange. This indicates that it's an editable mesh now. The orange highlighted area of an editable mesh is the current selection. Right now, every single face of this box is selected, and they all fall into one big surface group.
If you click anywhere in the blue area of the Perspective Viewport, it will de-select the faces of the box and turn it to a light shade of gray. All that denotes is that there are no faces selected. Don't worry, all of this starts to make sense later on.
The Toolbar: Primitive, Selection, Transform, Textures, and Other Editing Tools
Let's turn our attention to the top panel in the interface, the Toolbar. There are several different sets of tools, each with their own purpose within the modelling process. Let's examine each group in left-to-right order. This in only an overview. We will practice using these tools later in this guide.
The first group of tools are the Primitive tools:
This is the same suite of primitves that appear in the Scene Editor: Sphere, Geosphere, Box, Pyramid, Cone, Cylinder, Torus, Plane, and Polyhedron. In the Advanced Modeler, however, they operate differently. When you hover the mouse over one of these buttons, you'll notice that the ToolTip reads, "Create ______ Mesh," rather than just "Create _____." When you create a primitive in the Advanced Modeler, it is an editable mesh right off the bat. The only time you can manipulate object-level properties like segmentation is before you actually create the object in one of the viewports.
The second group of tools are the Selection tools:
The first tool is Vertex Selection, which can be used to select an individual vertex or a group of vertices. In the context of 3D modelling, a vertex is the point where two or more edges meet. Moving a vertex is useful for changing the shape of a face or the angle of an edge.
The second tool is Soft Selection, which is a proprietary tool in Swift 3D that selects a group of vertices within a specified radius, and is used to move them in groups at varying "speeds," depending on how close they are to the center of the selection. This is a really neat tool that we'll get into in more detail later.
The third tool is Edge Selection, which can be used to select an individual edge or group of edges. Moving or rotating edges is useful for changing the shape of a face, or moving groups of faces to create models that have twists or jagged parts. We'll do plenty of that later on.
The fourth tool is Face Selection, which can be used to select an individual face or group of faces. This selection tool holds many uses, from actually moving, rotating, and extruding faces, to defining Surface Groups and Smoothing Groups for material application and outline rendering. More on that later.
The fifth tool is Surface Group Selection, which is used to select an entire group of faces that have been grouped into a Surface Group. A Surface Group is a group of faces that will be edited together when you use one of the transform tools, and they will also share the same material when you apply one. Surface Groups are an integral part of the modelling and rendering process in Swift 3D, and we'll get into them in very great detail later on.
The last selection tool, which is grayed out in this screenshot, is the Object Selection tool. This button is only enabled when you do not have the Edit Mesh button pressed. If you have multiple objects selected in the Scene Editor and then click the Advanced Modeler tab, you will have to use this tool to select a specific object before you press the Edit Mesh button.
The third group of tools are the Transform tools:
Once you've used a Selection tool to select a group of vertices, edges, or faces, you need to choose one of the Transform tools in order to manipulate that selection. In order from left to right, these are: Move, Rotate, Scale Uniform, and Extrude. The first three are pretty intuitive, except that in the Advanced Modeler you are moving, rotating, or scaling individual pieces of a the mesh and not a whole object. Below is a my handy cheat sheet of when you can use each of these tools:
Vertex Selection: When your selection is composed of one vertex, you can only use the Move and Rotate tools. When it's multiple vertices, you can use Move, Rotate, and Scale Uniform.
Edge Selection: When your selection is composed of one edge, you can use Move and Rotate. You can also use Scale Uniform, but can only scale an edge along the axes that it crosses (for example, a straight vertical edge can only be scaled along the Y axis). When your selection is multiple edges, you can use Move, Rotate, and Scale Uniform.
Face Selection: When your selection is composed of one or more faces, all four Modelling Tools are fair game. The Extrude Tool functions in the same way as the Extrusion Editor, but it's more powerful in the Advanced Modeller. In this interface, you pick individual faces or a group of faces to be extruded, and you define the direction and distance. You can even use the "Normal," option, which has the effect of expanding a shape outward while retaining its angles. Much more on that later.
Surface Group Selection: This tool gives you one-click selection of an entire Surface Group. Once selected, Surface Groups behave in the same way as selections that were made with the Face Selection tool.
The fourth section in this panel holds several tools:
The paint bucket icon is a toggle, which when pressed will activate Edit Texture Mode. Edit Texture Mode gives you highly detailed control over the application of vector materials and bitmap textures to individual surface groups, including the ability to scale and align bitmap textures with great precision. More on that later.
The magnifying glass icon is the Frame All Objects button. What this does is zoom your active viewport so that you can see all of the objects in the workspace. Sometimes when modelling a large, complicated mesh with many parts, it's easy to be zoomed way in on one specific part of it for precision editing. Hitting this button is a fast and easy way to zoom back out to a viewpoint where you can see the entire mesh you're working on. I press it about 150 times per project.
The next two buttons, which are grayed out in this screenshot, are the Undo and Redo buttons. Next to them, of course, is the Edit Mesh button that we pressed back at the beginning of this guide.
That's a nice rough overview of the Toolbar in the Swift 3D Advanced Modeler. All of these tools with be explained in great detail with hands-on demonstrations in later parts of this guide.
The Properties Panel: Settings and Statistics
Now let's turn our attention to the left panel of the interface, the Properties Panel. This is where you look to get information about your mesh as a whole and/or your current selection. You also use this panel to edit the settings of whichever tool you are currently using, whether it's a Primitive, Selection, or Transform tool.
When nothing in the workspace is selected and there is no Transform Tool selected, the default five pages of this panel are: General, Selection, Surface Groups, Smoothing Groups, and Object.
The General Page
The General page gives you three sections: Modeler Options, Settings, and Object.
The two Modeler Options are toggle checkboxes for Auto Smooth and Redraw All Viewports. With the Auto Smooth box checked, Swift 3D will use a built-in algorithm to smooth the surface groups of your model. With it unchecked, the smoothing of your model will be controlled by Smoothing Groups that you define yourself. The Redraw All Viewports checkbox controls whether or not Swift 3D will update all four viewports in real time as you edit your model. By default, this option is turned off, which means that Swift 3D will only conduct real-time updates of the active viewport. The active viewport is the one in which you are working.
Under the Settings section, there is one setting called Nudge Increment. This refers to keyboard nudging, which is done with the arrow keys on the keyboard. The increment by default is 0.10, which is a very small amount that allows for great precision when nudging objects and selections in the Advanced Modeler. Keyboard nudging, of course, is useful for ensuring that you move your selection in a perfectly straight line along the chosen axis.
The Object section displays the name of the object that you are currently editing, and the Statistics sub-section provides a tally of the Vertices, Edges, Faces, and Surface Groups in your model. These numbers refer to the entire model, not the selection.
The Selection Page
The Selection page gives you three sections: Options, Smartweld Tolerance, and Soft Select.
Under the Options section, there are three checkboxes. The first checkbox, Enable Mouseover, controls a mouseover effect that highlights a part of your mesh when you hover the mouse over it. The part of the mesh that will be highlighted on mouseover is determined by which Selection tool you are currently using.
The Smartweld Tolerance is a setting that determines how close together a group of vertices has to be in order for the Smartweld to accurately weld them by pairs. We'll get into vertex welding in great detail later in this guide.
The Soft Select settings apply only to the Soft Select selection tool. The Curve Type and Form Factor settings are important when using the Soft Select tool, and will be covered later in this guide. The Vertex Radius sets the size of the area that the Soft Select tool will affect when selecting vertices.
The remaining three pages of the Properties Panel are: Surface Groups, Smoothing Groups, and Object. These will be covered in Part 2 of this guide.
This has been a brief overview of the Swift 3D Advanced Modeler. Now that you are familiar with its interface, you will have no difficulty following the hands-on exercises in later parts of this guide.