Digitizing and Editing Alignment Strings

Creating and amending animation alignment strings in 3D

Digitizing and Editing Alignment Strings

Digitizing a New Alignment String

Alignment strings can be digitized directly onto wireframe surfaces in the 3D window:

  1. Load and display the required wireframe surface in the 3D window.

  2. In the Sheets control bar, active 3D window folder, right-click the Strings sub-folder, choose New.

  3. In the String Properties dialog, type a name for the string into the Name box, click OK.

  4. In the 3D window, digitize (left-click) the required sequence of points onto the wireframe surface.

  5. Press <Esc> to stop digitzing string points.

  6. The point (or vertex) and edge of the string are displayed using the default rendering settings. You can change the rendering options later, after the trace has been defined.

elevate your viewpoint and pitch the view direction down so that you can see the surface - if there is a shallow angle between your view direction and the surface, small movements of the cursor may produce very large movements over the surface.

String Properties

In the Sheets control bar, active 3D window folder, right-click the Strings sub-folder, select Properties to display and edit the string properties. More than one string can be defined under the same string name, for example, you might create a string name of "Blasts" and define a number of separate blast outlines. For more information on the String Properties dialog, see Related Topics.

Editing Strings

Expand the string name to display the strings available to your current project. Right-click the string number and choose an option from the string editing menu:

Field details:

The following options are available from the string editing context menu:

Add vertices: add vertices to the end of the selected string.

Delete last vertex: delete the vertex at the end of the selected string.

Fit to surface: fit the string onto the surface - used when importing 2D strings

Delete: delete the entire string.

Properties: display the coordinates menu to edit the coordinates of vertices manually.

If digitizing strings with the new-string command, you can complete the digitizing operation by double-clicking the final string vertex position.

 

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 Rendering strings
Fitting strings onto a 3D surface
Importing strings
Attaching objects to strings