In this video, I'm going to introduce using 2D shapes. I'm going to talk about how we're going to use those 2D shapes to create our Mandala forms. What is a Mandala form? I'm going to talk a little bit about and why we're using them and why you're going to be designing some of them in this next assignment. If this course is about 3D modeling, then why are we spending an entire lesson to focus on 2D modeling, essentially 2D lines and curves and shapes? Well, if we want to create more complex 3D forms, something beyond these default objects that we've been creating, like this tree form on the left, we really need to know a lot about 2D lines, curves, and shapes. Because actually most of the work in 3D modeling is using those 2D lines, curves, and shapes to create the geometry before we create 3D surface forms. Actually creating the surfaces is the last step. Then we might do some service surface editing, but actually most of the work is occurring with these 2D lines. They're understanding them, becoming dexterous with them is essential to becoming a better 3D modeling. What is a Mandala? Well, you could Google it and you're going to find millions of Mandala images online. There's lots of examples out there and essentially always has the same form. It's a radial form, so it's generated from a central point, and then typically some geometry or graphic it's duplicated around that central point. It's a very simple to understand geometric construction. It's one of the reasons that it's interesting for us to look at. It's a very common form. It's actually has its origins in ancient origins and Sanskrit culture and it's used quite a bit in art practices, but also in different secular and profane practices you'll find it in. It's a very common form. Why it's interesting for us an exercise? Well, one of the reasons is because it has this central point and a lot of the geometries organized around this an axes. This idea that we have an underlying structure that we organize our geometry around is a really fundamental idea to 3D modeling and one that we're going to continue to explore throughout the course. It allows us to introduce 2D shapes and then also making planar surfaces from those shapes. It allow us to introduce tools like trim and join and explode. We can start to play with color and object properties. We can look at an array tool which really starts to harness the power of the computer to duplicate forms in interesting ways. It's also a type of form that allows for endless possibilities in designs. The 2D shapes that we're going to be working with, circle, ellipse, square, polygon, or sometimes called N-Gon, which essentially means a shape that can have multiple sides, and then the star, which is a particular polygon. These are all the default 2D shapes that we can work with, but we're not really limited to those shapes. In this exercise, we can actually edit those shapes. We can start to deform them based on our desires. There's two different ways deform a shape. One is called a control point deformation and one is if we're working with curves specifically, we can use something called curve edit points. Now if we have a curvy shape like a circle, the object control points, some of them are going to lie on this control lattice outside of that curve. If we have a square, if we have a rectilinear shape, those control points are always going to lie coincident on that geometry. Curve edit points always lie coincident on the geometry. It's just different flavors for how you want to go about editing those forms. I can literally take those control points, and I can drag them into space and it's going to change those shapes. I could select multiple control points at once and I can drag them, which is of course going to have a different effect, and so we're free to edit these things as we want. Now trim and join. If I have two 2D shapes and they overlap each other and they have to be on the same plane. I'm going to talk about polarity in a minute. But they have to be on the same plane. If I constructed them on the C plane, they should be on the same plane. If they overlap each other, I can use one to essentially cut or trim the other. After I'm done with that, I can then join these shapes into one new hybrid shape. I can do that for as many shapes as I want. The control lattice that you see at the bottom of the screen is the control lattice for this newly created shape out of these multiple shapes, and so if I selected a bunch of those control points, I could deform this entire shape and the whole thing is going to change and be editable. Now from planar curves, I can produce planar surfaces. When I produce planar surfaces from planar curves, they're produced as something entirely other. There's no connection back to the original curves. I've actually move these over so we can see that we're dealing with two completely separate pieces of geometry. In order to create a planar surface from a planar curve, that curve has to be planar. It has to lie flat. All parts of its geometry, have to lie flat within the same plane. It also has to be closed. If I have an open geometry, it will not produce a planar surface from that. If for some reason I've lifted up a corner of that rectangle in the Z direction or pulled it down, I've pulled it out of plane and that's going to throw an error if I try to produce a planar surface from it. It's going to say no, it can't do that. If I have two shapes and they're in the same plane, and one is completely inside the other. I select those two together before or I might select planar surface, it's going to make a surface which has a hole in it. I can do that with as many shapes as I want. if I had a bunch of other shapes inside the square and I selected them all together, it's going to produce a bunch of holes in that surface. Now I'm going to just quickly run through the Mandala construction sequence. I do a whole tutorial on this, I will show it in Rhino. I also have the series of steps in the assignment PDF. I think it's always best to be redundant with these things. But it's a few steps. It's not that complicated. What we're going to do is we're going to want to start with this axis. Back to this idea that I have something which I'm structuring my geometry around. Along that axis, I can position my shapes. I can either create them outside of that axis and move them to the axis, or I can construct them along the axis. I then decide on which shapes. If I want to join some shapes together to make them hybrid forms, I can do that. At this point, I might edit those shapes, manipulate them a little bit. Then I decide, do I want to have some holes in these? If I'm going to make surfaces out of these, or I'm I going to have like shapes inside shapes, a position as a desire? Then I create my planer surfaces from those shapes. Then one thing in this Step 5, I'm going to talk about this a bit more in the tutorial, but when I have surfaces on top of surfaces, I get this little moiré pattern because its surfaces are existing in the same space. In order to avoid that, I might want to pull the surfaces apart slightly in the Z direction, either positive or negative. What I'm really doing is I'm creating the Mandala, we call this a two-and-a-half D. We're taking a 2D form and we're pulling it into 3D, but it's not completely 3D, so it's somewhere in between two-and-a-half D form is what it's commonly called. Then we're going to look at this polar array tool, which allows me to duplicate that geometry around a central point. There's a number of parameters that are associated with that. How far do I want to go? How many parts do I want to duplicate? I will also be able to select different parts of the geometry and do them separately so I could produce them in different numbers and we'll look at that. That's the sequence you're going to go through. That's a little bit about shapes and planar surfaces and things that you'll experiment with in this next assignment.
