- [Instructor] Here, I wanna talk about
my favorite blending tool, and it's called Face Blend,
under the Surface tab, it's right there.
And this is a very powerful tool.
You can see here I have two separate surfaces.
The surfaces don't have to be sewn together,
I don't have to have a common edge.
These are two completely separate bodies.
They don't even have to touch
or intersect the way these do.
You can see here one sticks out through the other.
If this had a gap, as long as the blend is big enough
to bridge to gap, it'll put the blend on.
So, basically, the way this works is you select
your first body, in this case that one,
and then come over here, pick my second body.
And as soon as I pick my second body,
you can see it dumps in that blend.
And now, I can adjust that radius based
off of the direction of these arrows.
These arrows determine where the radius goes.
This is basically breaking up the surface
into quadrants, as you can see here.
This surface is facing this direction,
this surface is facing this direction,
so that is where the ball goes.
If I reverse this, let me go ahead and shrink this
a little bit and put it on the other side.
You can see, well, if I want this surface to face
in this direction, I get the ball over here.
So, this, again, determines where the radius goes.
And I can switch this one as long as the radius
is small enough, in this case, to fit down here, we go.
So, I'm gonna reverse this back to the other side,
and let me bring this up a little bit, there we go.
So, with this, I have a constant radius that's going in.
Now, I have other width methods that I can use.
Right now, it's set to automatic.
This is for a constant radius.
And I now have what's called Constant.
You can see here it changes.
And what this is doing is rather than a ball
sitting in here and determining the radius,
it's measuring the distance between
the tangencies, between here and here.
So, currently, it's set to 50.
So, basically, it's just a cord,
it's a cordal distance between those two tangent edges.
And this is great because a lotta times
when you're doing something with steep angles,
and you have formability issues,
you may wanna use a constant width method,
and it'll help disperse areas where you're having
problems with formability, that type of thing.
If you take a look at the little flyout
that comes out when you hover over the top of it,
you can kinda see also what it's doing.
It's constant distance, and this is a constant
radius here, across those tangencies.
So, when I do use a constant method,
the radius actually does vary.
It's not a true radius of 50, it's just
the distance between those tangencies.
Next, I have Shape.
Right now it's set to Circular.
I can do Tangents and Curvature,
so I'll just do a Tangent Symmetric.
And what this does is it sets up a center radius for me.
So, I can shrink the center radius,
and, as you can see, it gives me some acceleration
coming in and out of that radius.
I'll just change this back to Circular.
Next thing I do wanna talk about is the Trim Blend options.
Right now, everything is set to trim all.
If I change this to say To Short,
you can see it does an inset, it trims to the shortest
bounding elements, in this case this surface.
If I say To Long, it extends out to the longest boundaries.
If I say None, you'll see it extends out beyond.
Now, with None, it's not actually gonna trim the blend,
it'll create a separate surface,
and you'll have to go back and trim everything up.
You sometimes have to do that.
It's nice to have that option.
Typically speaking, you're gonna
probably have things trim up.
I'll be honest with ya, this Trim To Long
has been very helpful to me over the years.
You may have something here in the web
that you wanna capture, and you can
just do your own trim afterward.
Like I said, I haven't used it too much in the past,
but when it's there, it really comes in handy.
So, those are my trims.
Now, I'm just gonna go ahead and hit
my OK to create that blend.
And you can see it trims everything and applies the blend.
If I double-click on it, I can go back in,
and look at my trim options.
If I say None, select OK,
now you'll see it didn't trim anything.
The color of the blend is coming
from the first surface that I selected.
So, this is basically driving the attributes of that.
If I double-click on that again, and I say Trim,
say To All, Sew All Faces, and select OK.
Now, we have that nice cubic transition in that web.
So, Face Blend, extremely powerful tool.
You can get a lotta different shapes,
the surfaces don't have to touch,
they don't have to be sewn, they don't have to intersect,
they can have two separate bodies.
Whether the surfaces are solids,
you can apply this to solid faces.
Great tool.