Box Cyl Cone

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You just got Flux Studio and can't figure out the first thing about it. Reading the help files and looking at some of the examples is a good idea. On this page I will cover some basic aspects of beginning to model with Flux Studio.

Lets stack up a cube, a cylinder, and a cone...

The first thing I like to do it to turn on the 4 Standard Views, it lets you see the objects from several sides at once. Another thing I like to do is to turn on the scale grid. In VRML one unit equals a meter, this will help you build objects to a reasonable scale.

	Next, if you click on the box icon, then click in one of the view windows you will add a box to the scene. You should see the box appear as an item in the Tree window. If you don't see the tree window, click on the tree icon.
Tree Icon		If you double click on the box in the tree window, you will see the box properties window appear. If you click on the Materials tab, you will see that you can change the color of the box. For this exercise, choose blue. If you look at the other tabs, you will see that you can turn the box (rotate), or re-size it (scale), or even put a picture on it (a texture). For this exercise, click on the Box tab and change the width, height, and depth to 2.

box_prop.jpg (36264 bytes)

OK, now lets put a cylinder on top of the box. Click on the cylinder icon, then click in the front view window just above the box. You may end up with something like this...

box_cyl.jpg (65739 bytes) box_cyl_cone_tree.jpg (18603 bytes)

To get the cylinder to line up with the box you can try to drag it (translate or transform it to a new location) or, if you double click on the cylinder in the Tree window to open its properties box and select the Trans tab, you will see that you can manually set the location of the box by typing in numbers (or resetting them to zero). Hit the zero button for X & Z, this centers the cylinder. The up & down axis in VRML is known a the Y axis. Make Y =2. Additionally, this alignment will be easier if you turn on the snap-to-grid option (two icons over from the grid icon as seen at the top of this document).

cylinder_trans.jpg (27670 bytes)

You may find that you did not get the Box in the exact center of the view window. Double click the box and look at the properties on the Trans tab for it. Set X and Z to zero for it too.

You should have something like this...

box_cyl_stack.jpg (77254 bytes)

Now use what you have learned to position a green cone on top of the cylinder. You can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to shift the box and cone down in the front view window. X and Z values should be zero and Y should be 4. Double click on the cone and select the Material tab then click on the color green. Your results should possibly look like this...

boxcylcone_stack.jpg (76785 bytes)

Hit the save to disk icon and save the file with a descriptive name (I used box_cyl_cone.spz).

You can also export a VRML file (.wrl) by selecting the file menu and the Export VRML97 World option. If you want to look at the file in a text editor, you can change the File Export Options so that you do not gzip the file, and then when you export the file it will be in plain ASCII text (readable by a human, not compressed binary code).

Normally you want to gzip (compress) the files, it makes them 10 times smaller than an ASCII file that is why this is the default in Flux Studio.

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