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Page 5 of 12
Moving on, let's start a section on how to create extrusions and sweeps in trueSpace. An extrusion is the performance of pushing a path in a backward or forward direction to define the depth axis of an object (a path) that already has height and width. A sweep is the same as an extrusion, except the path is pushed forward or backward a number of times, and each time, the 2D path can take a new size, direction, or rotation. This will make sense in a moment, when we create a heart with a bevel edge.
The easiest way to get a path into the workspace is to add one from the path library. Click and drag on the pull-down panel directly to the right of the keyframe editor panel, and then let go when your cursor is over the green heart and circle icon. In figure 34, I'm click on the Heart title to add a spline (a sort of vector that can be curved) of a heart to the workspace. I'd suggest, as also shown in figure 34, that you choose the ¾ view of the workspace, because the heart spline is a 2D object in 3D space, perfectly parallel to the floor, and that means that at certain viewing angles, it'll be hard or impossible to find.
Now that you can see the heart shape, it's time to sweep it. Right-click on the Sweep tool on the toolbox (see the inset image in figure 35) to display the settings for the sweep. The defaults are fine for this experiment—as you can see in figure 35, only the Z aspect of the space—the depth we'll add to the heart—has a value on the palette. As soon as you left click on the Sweep icon with the heart selected, a new spline appears in green above the original heart, and there are connectors between the first and second hearts. This is a wireframe view of a straight extrude function. Also, you'll note that a point Nav(igation) menu has cropped up. Marvelous! We will use this handy little box in a moment.
Now, the entire top heart is green, and that means that the whole top heart is available for editing. What we want to do to create a bevel edge heart is to make the top heart smaller than the original—and all the vectors (the vertices) connecting the two shapes will change and accommodate. Click on the Scale icon on the Point Nav menu, as shown in figure 36, and then while holding both mouse buttons, drag up or down to scale the whole heart larger or smaller. I don't care which.
Congratulations! You've created a bevel edge heart.
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