Strata Design 3D CX 6: the designers’ key to unlock 3D

Working with Strata Design 3D CX 6

Every 3D package has a certain set of grouped tools to create their models, light the scene, create and apply materials, place cameras and render the scene. In more extended packages this will be enhanced with animation and all kinds of special effects like smoke, clouds, fire and even more sophisticated particle effects. Strata Design 3D has all of these capabilities but before we take a look at what the package has to offer in its toolset let’s also investigate how you as a user can navigate the 3D space in which all of your work is going to take place. After all this is where 3D is that extra step that, as a traditional 2D designer you might have never experienced before.

Navigating 3D space

Pan and Zoom

Rotate and Tilt

Users of Photoshop and Illustrator will be glad to see that the for them so familiar command and spacebar key combinations will allow them to pan and zoom in 3D also here in Strata Design. Rotating adds the shift key to this mix and I have to confess that that takes some getting used to. But in the end you get used to using these keys and combinations and will find your way around a scene really quickly.

Design allows you to view your scene in multiple views simultaneously or via a single view in combination with a press of a numeric key. These views can be orthogonal views with no perspective distortion (which can be very helpful when modeling and positioning elements in a scene) or with moderate or high perspective distortion. The views can be set independently of each other so you can mix and match views to best suit your own workflow. A series of small micro icons allow you to set visual properties of each view directly in the viewing window itself.

Every view can be shaded independently from a choice of point cloud, wireframe, hidden line, flat shaded, smooth shaded, and several toon-shaded modes.

Modeling, Lighting and Views

Modeling is obviously one of the key sections in a 3D application. The toolset will largely dictate the amount of flexibility you, as a designer, will have in creating your vision in 3D. Strata has a large collection of tools that will aid you in creating sophisticated models.

Direct Creation Shapes

Like many 3D applications, Strata Design grouped tools into more or less logical units.  The first of these is the group of, what I will call “direct creation tools”.  These tools allow you to add or create an object directly into the scene.

3D Primitives

Some of the more familiar ones are primitive shapes like spheres, cubes, cylinders, cones and pyramids. In themselves they are not that spectacular but once you break them apart and use Strata’s editing features you can quickly makes these basic shapes into much more sophisticated models really fast.

2D Primitives

The second member of the direct creation tools is 2D shapes creation tools. In this group you will find primitive flat shapes like ellipses, rectangles, rectangles with rounded corners and a strangely called 2D polygon tool, which is actually a regular n-Gon tool where you can tell it how many edges the shape should have. With this one you can create pentagons, hexagons and so on.

The Pen Tool

The third member of this group is the ubiquitous pen tool. It not only looks familiar to Illustrators’ and Photoshop’s’ pen tool but more or less behaves the same way. But now you can edit your Beziers in 3D as well.

The Text Tool

Finally rounding out the direct creation tools section is a text tool. This gives you the opportunity to directly add text from Design 3D. For those among you that go a while back in time, you may remember a package that Strata sold separately as Strata Type. Well, this is Strata Type functionality folded straight into the type tool. The type tool give you the possibility of defining spatial arrangement of your type, a bevel, a thickness and a font. And very nice is the fact that even if you type an error that everything can be corrected afterwards.

Derivative Tools

When you have laid the groundwork with either 3D primitives or 2D shape tools it’s time to start editing them. Especially for the 2D base shapes you can then start to add depth.

Extrude, Lathe and Skin

There is a fly-out menu to help you achieve this with options to extrude them in a straight way or extrude them along a path. These are classic construction tools. Another one that falls into this category is the lathe tool. By creating a simple profile with the pen tool for instance you can quickly generate revolved shapes like bottles, rockets, etc.

The next tool in this group is the skin tool. With the skin tool you can wrap a skin around a series shapes, or ribs, to create organic looking irregular forms.

Boolean Operations

There is also a fly out menu that has some Boolean operations grouped together. With Booleans you can add, subtract cut or intersect objects from each other. This can result in complex shapes that are hard to achieve in any other way. A word of caution though, Booleans can produce a lot of artifacting and the resulting shapes might not always be suitable for further editing.

Reflect Tool

With the reflect tool you can quickly create a mirror copy of your original shape, group or object. This is very handy when you have to create for instance interface variations where you have modeled for instance a printer with display element biased towards the left. The simple reflect tool just mirrors and copies the selected object, shape or group and that’s it. If you change the original the mirrored copy remains unchanged. With the linked reflect tool however a “live” copy is created that is still connected to the original group. If you change something in the original group the reflected half will update accordingly.

Deform Tools

There are two ways to deform objects with these deformation tools. One is a lattice deformation tool. This one lets you attach a “cage” of points around an object. When you edit the points on the cage object the shape that this deformation lattice is attached to will deform accordingly.

A variation on this tool is the second one in this fly-out menu, which is called the Jiggle, deform tool. This one does more or less the same as the deform tool but works its magic when used in animations to achieve animated deformations. Deformation tools can be very handing when you need to bend shapes into certain directions or forms that are not their normal “state”.

Joint and Bone Tools

For more exact control over your objects’ deformations you may want to consider using bones and joints.

The bone is used for creating character like animations and, like the name implies, it allows you to create a bone system for a selected shape or group of shapes. The bone tool is used to lay out your bone system but all of the control that you will eventually use to animate and actually deform your objects is accessed from the object info panel.

The joint tool create a hierarchical link between a parent object and one or more child objects. You can specify which types of motion are inherited from the parent object.

Finally there are an attach tool and a convert to path tool that round out the options for modeling and creating structural links between objects and object groups.

This story written by Albert Kiefer

Albert Kiefer is a professional designer and technical expert located in the Netherlands. He has well over 20 years of experience in the fields of computer illustration, animation and image manipulation. He also develops interactive concepts and graphical interfaces for large international corporations that are active in consumer electronics.