Vectorworks 2024: Learn Freeform 3D in 15 Mins

hi everybody Jonathan here with another vetto tutorial and today we're going to be looking at doing some amazing free form 3D modeling I've been inspired by some architecture that I've been looking at recently this is the Iron Man house over in South Africa which is unbelievable I saw a really good YouTube video on this that I recommend to you and I was kind of thinking to myself how would I go about modeling some of the architecture and the style of uh 3D that you see here so let's jump into this tutorial and I think you'll enjoy some of the new tools that you might learn and basically some of the free form sort of modeling capabilities that you may not be aware of that V has in abundance so without further Ado let's jump into this new tutorial thanks for watching everybody and enjoy so let's get started on this 3D modeling tutorial so I'm just going to turn my grid off and basically go into my model and I'm going to create a circle 9 M wide in radius so 18 M diameter going to change to 3D and then just extrude down let's go down and say minus a meter or up a meter and basically this is going to form the base of my model now next up I'm going to basically jump straight into a tool that you may not have used called the taper face tool and what I'm going to do here is select the bottom Edge and basically that enables me to taper outwards or inwards this upper Edge to create a really nice sort of uh shamed if you like curved form okay so that's looking good so the next thing I'm going to do is push and pull this vertical element there just to make that a little bit thicker on the base and finally one of my favorite tools is the shelling tool so already you can see that I've managed to Shell out this hollow and basically I'm going to drag on some nice concrete onto this material and basically looks great already once you get that material on there now I can scale up or scale down the concrete a little bit and rotate it as required very easily in the rendering tab ofet works okay so what we're going to do next is basically go for another Circle but this time time I'm going to use the automatic plane generate a three-point circle and extrude up now just be careful I don't want to add it uh to the model as I did by mistake so this time I'll do the same thing again and basically get my circle tool by three points check on the automatic plane and instead of extruding up I won't add it this time okay so that's a really good little tip you can add or not add so now what we can do is use our shell tool um or taper rather uh before we do the shelling to taper out this um other Circle element now just make sure you get the right positive or negative number when you're doing the tapering um you can actually go both ways so this is really cool okay so now I'm going to go for something called the extracting tool make sure that if you do use the extract surface tool you try and extract surfaces and you can see I've extracted that surface and now basically I can delete that inner element or I can keep it now it can be a bit tricky to select so what I've done is selected my ner surface that I extracted and just made it blue so you can kind of read that a bit more clearly so I often use groups in order to isolate things then I can double click work inside the group and then basically pop back out when I'm ready so what we're going to do is once again use our shell tool and we're going to change this uh sort of shell thickness to about 500 mil and basically that means that I can now draw another Inner Circle and punch through using this subtract solid mode to create a really nice sort of hollowed out um surface there so next up I'm going to double click number four the rectangle tool and just generate a uh sort of shape of a rectangle let's put it into the middle there by using the Anchor Point and select that into the middle pop it into that middle point and now basically I'm going to move it up and slightly intersect it you'll see where I'm going with this in a second once I duplicate an array so I'm going to go for a duplicate array with a circular array um let's do about 12 sides let's do 360 ided by 12 so I'd have to we that out around the next maximize click and basically just make sure when you do that duplicate array that you do check the used rotation there we go rotate duplicates so now when it rotates it rotates nicely at that angle okay so fantastic so now what I can do is extrude those items um just make sure that they're bigger than the uh element that we're trying to intersect with and I can go to um subtract solids and basically you can see that I can essentially subtract those solids or if I want to what matter she really Keen to do is Select them both so select all and this time I will go to intersect so that basically instead of subtracting it leaves me the bit where they intersect to create a nice little bit of structure uh for my developing design here so I can use my eye dropper tool um if I'm careful just to kind of paste in the attributes if you like of the concrete for that group so now what I'm going to do is basically use a really amazing command called The filp Tool basically by selecting all the edges even within the group you'll notice that I can actually round them off so that filling works really nicely even though all of those objects are one single object essentially because they're one solid subtraction so let's pop out of the group and the model is coming on quite nicely so next up I'm going to basically create a a large plane of glass um so this is flat at the moment so let's offset inside say 50 mil um and basically we'll select both and we'll do clip surface from my lovely command there so next up I'm going to extrude I think we'll put 20 mil for the glass and let's let the uh frame if you like and let's extrude that maybe a little bit more let's say 150 let's use a couple of simple materials so we'll have gray and also let's just put some glass material so I'm going to go over to my textures just apply some glass some blue glass if you like into there okay so I've got what could be something like a window now I'll just move the glass up to the middle a using the b key to see my x-ray View so when I'm ready I can select this element here and basically uh select the surface and now for an amazing command which I think you'll love going to go to something called create surface array so with the surface array I can basically select some different numbers you can see that I've chosen to duplicate horizontally around the number repetitions there 20 but I can increase that as much as I like dynamically let's try 30 um and see how that looks that looks a lot better so this is a really really great way to make things like curtain Walling and plain our glazing um basically especially when things are sort of Leaning at angled you know it just basically took that element and repeated it around okay so we're doing a little bit work on the floor subtraction here um I'm quite Keen to basically get a Stairway coming up into my tower here so I'm going to go for my stair tool and of course V to has lots and lots of really wonderful stairs built in and you will find circular stairs or spiral stairs and you just need to kind of change those parameters as we're doing in the dialogue at the moment so there's all sorts of things that we can change things like the stair width the diameter the inside diameter and so on as well and basically when I click okay let's just flick over the top plan and place that stair you should see I've got a really nice spiral stair um that I can basically position a bit more correctly vertically leading up to my wonderful little Tower here so this is very very um I can also edit things like some of the materials on that stair as well by going into the settings um and I'll leave you to play around with that so it's a bit more detailed as well so we need a bit of a landing here so I'm just going to push and pull and extrude up my little Landing let's just check the height and of course I can right click and add solids to join those together just to create that Landing for the stair so with a couple of more clicks I can trace around a circle there I could now basically offset to to create what feels like a wall just there we go using close open curves and I can extrude up to basically give it a nice concrete material so we've got a bit of a ballast tring round if I double click I can go into the uh profile and edit that and just basically add surface a couple of rectangles in order to kind of complete this so right click add surface and then pop back out there we go so I've got a really nice little spiral stair leading up into my tower building so next next up I think we need the roof elements so I'm just going to draw that in plan and trace it over so now I'm going to go back to plan I'm going to use my offset tool and I'm going to decide by uh point mode because I haven't quite decided what we're going to do yet let's turn off the close by uh close open curbs and basically let extrude that up say 1200 mil again that's looking pretty good so now we can go once again to that wonderful tapering command and put that nice little tapered angle there okay let's also um increase the thickness a little bit of the shell and basically let's shell It by Say 300 and then basically I'm going to just want to kind of create a slightly more vertical element to this sort of roof Terrace if you like up on the top okay so I'm pretty happy with that um I do want to have a nice roof light punched in so I'm going to push and pull and basically extrude uh through let me just use the b key just to check that's going through and then we select them both and we do um basically solid subtraction so that will create a nice hole with roof light if I do want to I can also go and do intersect by pasting in place and now essentially I can use that um and apply my glass to the intersection element so with a few more clicks we can drag on some nice materials of some concrete from our renderworks textures that we've already imported so I'm going to be basically extracting this surface so that I can extrude it and apply a nice green sort of turf material just so we've got this nice sort of grass roof up there um couple double clicks I can basically go in and copy out any elements inside like that solid subtraction and if I do want to once again I use the circle by three points which is incredibly useful let's offset it a little bit here um say 300 and let's punch in and clip surface so now I can extrude this element up and basically uh apply concrete to it and finally let's just pull it down a little bit and add solids so that it's joined on to that roof element so we've got one bigger element on our roof soever it's always good to have a little spin around just s of give your model a bit of a check over once in a while um so here I'm going to basically just work on the uh sort of element below the tower itself so leading up to the tower so I've drawn a big circle and let's just extrude that down in sections um just make sure you go a negative Extrusion if you want to go down rather than up okay so that's looking good now if you haven't used these smart options I recommend that you go into your uh basically preferences is and just tune up so that you've got the tools uh that you need to do the job where you want them so now for example when I tap space I can do things like change view I can s access my 3D views there so what I'm going to do is pull this down about say 15 M again just make sure you go in the right direction and keep the negative if it is moving down and what you can also do even though it added if I do want to I could basically um use the offset and the taper Edge and this time you'll notice that I can take out the whole uh surface which is really cool so that's kind of looking good that sort of tower tapering upwards next I'm going to push and pull a little bit of vertical down at the bottom there so I think what we need to do is pop up to top plan let's go a nice big circle for a base and we'll Trace that around let's extrude it a little bit um and then go into my side view and just move it down just to give a nice sort of Base to set our tower on so already you can see within a few minutes this is looking pretty good I've got few nice textures and I've used quite a few of the more unusual Form Tools in our vect to form uh the model so now we can start creating some viewports now I've got the design site version so I'm going to create multiple viewports um if you don't have this one just create one at a time but the benefit of creating multiple viewports is obviously that you get all four viewports uh for one click if you like now I've got a pretty big page so I'm going to reduce my page size just so we've got say 2 by two or 4x4 pages and let's go ahead and click update with shaded mode going to get myself a little bit more paper just tiling those a3s together just to give myself a bit more space to lay out my drawings on I've gone back to the design layer and you'll see that if I get my clip Cube and try and sort of cut a section through the model at the moment of course the uh sort of tower structure if you like is completely solid so that was one thing I forgot to do I just want to hollow it out using the um shell solid surface so that basically means I've got my stab inside you can see now so I'm going to make the Riser height a little bit bigger I'm going to give it a slightly bigger tread and let's go for um a bigger number on the tread depth now I realized from experimenting the biggest stair that you can have seems to be about 15 M doesn't quite make it so I can do one stair then I could obviously hold down the control key or the ult key on the Mac and basically copy another stair down and obviously I can have another Landing there in the middle as well so now when i h b down you'll notice I've got all the way through now this will really become apparent when I cut my section through you see those wonderful spiral stairs going at my tower into the the main sort of uh top of the tower there the control room as it were so I've got a bit of a problem with the landing I can fix that later with a landing or rotating the stair but let's just carry on and basically I'm going to create a section put this on the same sheet layer and you see I've got this really really nice sort of section drawing Now featuring on my set of drawings so we can basic basically align and distribute those so let's just align them and equally space them just to kind of get our presentation absolutely spot on and you see I've got not only a really nice sort of section that I did in top plan I've got some sections of just the tower but I've also got some sections of the model itself inside section so we're almost done basically I'm just going to pop back to my design layer and delete that section line I don't really want to see that at the moment and basically you'll see that I can basically move around in real time using the Shaded mode and things like the walkthrough tool are little example of a cool little kind of control tower or something like that obviously it needs a bit more work inside for sure but I really do hope you've enjoyed uh this tutorial just to show you how quick and easy it is to basically visualize your uh weird ideas and sometimes modeling up things free form in vectorx is extremely fast you know I love all the bin modeling and things like that that you can do with Vector I'm sure you've seen my other videos but basically I really really love the free form modeling and sometimes I just think it's fantastic just to play around and model up something crazy from your imagination just in order to have a little play and create something a bit creative that you wouldn't normally get to do on a day job of course you know I've never been commissioned to design a tower like this before so with a few final tweaks I can basically turn on things like ambient occlusion and things like shadowing click updates um of course updating the sheet DPI is going to make a much better image as well but look at this what a lovely lovely section already generated of my cool little Tower um I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do in this Tower itself I might you drop this into twin motion for another tutorial but thanks for watching everybody and I'll see you in the next one [Music] bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Jonathan Reeves CAD

Views: 1,663

Keywords: Vectorworks, Vectorworks BIM, Vectorworks Training, Cinema 4d, BIM modelling, Renderworks, Twinmotion, Vectorworks Architect, Vectorworks Landmark, 3D Dragger, Freeform Modellling, NURBS Modelling, Jonathan Reeves, history-based modeling, texturing tools, create surface from curves, 3D power pack, 3D axis labels, reshape tool, 3D dragger, Vectorworks tutorial, extrude along a path, subdivision, 3D polygons, solid subtraction, directional axis, Shell Tool, Deform Tool

Id: A8SAhNqalPI

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024