Wings 3D/User Manual/A Little Tutorial

DRAFT 1.6 91

� Section 5.3 Advanced Men WINGS3D USER MANUAL 5.4 A little tutorial. The first thing you need to do is make sure that you have Advanced Menus activated. Under Edit | Preferences make sure the Advanced Menus option (near the bottom of the form) is checked. Then click OK to return to the workspace.

Create a cube and select the top face. Then right click in the workspace to bring up the Face Operations Menu. Now hover over Move. Don't click anything!

Read the status bar and notice that a left click will use the standard axes whereas a right click will use custom vectors. I hope you have realized by now just how important the message passing in the status bar is. I cannot emphasis it enough. Click the Right Mouse Button to begin using vector operations.

At the right of the status bar Wings will tell you to Select Axis for Face Move. This is how you will define the vector. Click on the positive Z face and notice the appearance of a blue vector. Now click on the positive X face and notice that the direction of the vector changed. You can continue to select and deselect faces until you get the vector going the way you want it to. You can even use a remote object for this vector definition process.

Once you are happy with the direction of your vector then click the Right Mouse Button. Now you can move the mouse and watch the face move along the vector you just defined. Notice the instructions on the status bar as you are dragging. It now tells you that you can constrain the movement by holding down modifier keys while dragging. Dragging with the Shift key depressed will cause movement to be constrained to whole units, while the Ctrl key will cause movement to be constrained to tenths of units. That's it. You now know how to use Wings vector operations. Just try doing this a couple of times then try a few of the other commands. You'll have the routine down in no time.

Now let's practice a little with magnets.

Delete your cube and bring up a Grid primitive; right click to bring up the Primitives menu and look for Grid in the list of primitives. Don't click it, instead, click the option box on the right to specify how big we want our grid to be. A little pop-up box will ask you to specify the number of Rows/cols. Enter 20 and click OK. Grids are great for seeing the effects of magnets.

Select a vertex four in from the +Z/+X corner as shown below (Figure 58.a). Now Right Click to bring up the Vertex Operations menu. Then Left Click on Move to bring up the options sub-menu (Figure 58.b). Click on the little magnet icon to the right of Normal. Now read the status bar and notice the icon bar has changed. At the right of the status bar Wings is telling you what you need to do while to the left it is telling you how to do it. Right now it is telling you that you need to select the magnet influence (fall-off zone) for the move operation and that you do this by Left Clicking some elements. The Icon bar is telling you that those elements can be vertices, edges or faces (with vertices being the default).

The fall-off zone is defined as a radius from the initial selection point, so we only need to pick one other vertex to define it. Pick one that is four vertices away from the initial selection (Figure 58.c). It shows up as a big blue square on the +X edge of my grid in this case.

Notice that the status bar is still telling us that a Right Click will execute the command. So let's Right Click now and see what happens when we move the mouse around. As you move the mouse around watch the status bar again. It will tell you by how much the original vertex is moving, but it also tells you the radius of the fall-off zone. But we already defined the radius, so what is that for? Well, you can change the fall-off zone radius interactively as you drag by using the plus and minus (+ -) keys as indicated on the right side of the status bar. Go ahead and press the Plus key a couple of times and see