From the course: Autodesk Alias Subdivision Essential Training

Creating SubD primitives - Alias Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Alias Subdivision Essential Training

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Creating SubD primitives

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- [Presenter] Depending on where you are in your design process, sometimes it makes a lot of sense to start creating your entities from SubD primitives. So let's take a look at the three types of SubD primitives that you can create in Alias. So on the left-hand side, under the SubD tab, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to create a SubD cylinder. And let's take a look at the options that we have. So I can click in space, and let's just rotate the model slightly. It's a very simple dialogue box. We have the options to increase the spans radially like so, and we have the options to increase or decrease the spans in the Z direction. And all that's doing basically is adding more control to that particular entity. So let's come out of this command, and let's go up to window display, and under hardware shade you'll notice that I have a hotkey setup, which is S for shade. And the other option we're going to open up is under object display. We're going to go to diagnostic shading. So now we're in wireframe mode here. And if I click into box mode, you'll notice that it goes into our control cage mode, which is our simpler modeling viewing mode. And we can use any one of these modes as well to shade in smooth mode. So, like I said, I have S set up for hardware shade, and I have B set up for box mode, so we can toggle between the two like that. Let's take a look at our next entity, which is subdivision primitives box. So we're going to click in space. Now you'll notice that does not look like a box and that's because we're in smooth mode and we're in a very simple SubDiv one by one by one. So let's go ahead and increase the spans in X, Y, and Z. And now we're going to go into box mode, which was B, and you'll notice now that is more like what we would expect from a box. But again, if you go into the smooth mode, you'll notice it smooths the edges into slightly rounded corners like that. And finally, let's take a look at subdivision primitives plane. So let's click in space here. Now with a plane, it doesn't really matter whether you're in box mode or whether you're in smooth mode. A plane is just a flat entity, and again, very simple options that we have here. We can increase the spans in X, and we increase the spans in Y direction. So let's go ahead and slick these entities. We're going to delete those. And I'm going to open up the surface primitives layer, and let's do a quick comparison between these two entities. So you're probably familiar with the surface primitives that we have here. We have a lot more options with surfaces. We have a plain cylinder cube, a cone, torus, and a sphere. Whereas with SubD's, we only have the three, which is plane, cylinder and box. Shading affects these entities slightly differently. So again, let's go into B for box mode, and you'll notice as soon as I hit the B for box mode the surface primitives are just going to go back to their default wireframe. And if I press S for hardware shade, we're going to go into our smooth mode like this.

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