- The Ruled Surface command is a very
powerful one again, that allows us to create
lines that are perpendicular or normal to
existing edges in a model.
So, it's a great way to connect one surface
to another, and to create 3D shapes.
So, what I have here is, I've got this A cutout
inside of a surface.
So, if I hide this one here, I've got
two surfaces, I'll just show you kinda
what's going on here first,
is hide that one, you can see I've just got
a cutout in one of them,
and then I've got this other surface
directly on the inside here, which
I'm going to go ahead and show.
And that's just a blue surface,
so there's nothing in, it's a hollow shape.
And I want to connect the two together.
Alright, I want to fill in some surfaces
here between the two.
There's about a 100,000s gap between
the two of these, and that's what
I want to fill in.
So, what I'm gonna do is use the Ruled Surface.
So, here's the Ruled Surface, and I have
a bunch of different options.
I can be Tangent to the Surface,
I can be Normal to Surface,
Tapered to Vectors, all kinds of things here.
The most common one that I use is
Normal to Surface, and all I have to do then
is choose the edges I want to use.
So, I first am going to type in the
Direction and the Distance,
in this case I'm going to type in .2,
and then I'm going to go and click on
some of these edges.
So, I'm gonna go over the edges.
Notice they're gonna highlight,
and it just brings out a surface
directly normal to that edge.
And I'm just gonna work my way around
this A shape, and notice that as soon as
I do that, I just got this nice surface
but they're blending across those edges
and that they're in all directions really.
They're following that surface to
each one of those edges.
So, it would be very hard to do this
if you weren't using the Ruled Surface.
But really what I want to do is go
the other direction.
So, let's go ahead and flip that around
so now it's cutting into the shape here,
and I really only need to go the .1
but I do want to go further,
just so I can show and illustrate
what's happening there.
Once you click OK, it fills all that in
with Ruled Surface.
So, these are all individual surfaces now,
but they've been knitted together
to create one surface that goes
into there and cuts through it.
Let's go ahead and hide this surface here,
the very first one, and you can see
exactly what's going on there.
We still have a hole but we've kind of
filled in the edges of it, and they're all
following that outside curvature.
So, that's your basics for your Ruled Surface.
Then, what we can do is we can knit
those two surfaces together and start creating
a little bit more of a 3D shape.
So, the Ruled Surface again is very, very powerful.
All you really need to do is choose
an existing edge, choose either a Normal to
or a Direction Vector you might have already
defined with a line or something else
in your model, and then choose which edges
you want to use, and it's that simple.
That is the Ruled Surface.