Hey guys, this is Aaron.
I'm here in my little nursery here and I have this shape sorter toy on the ground and it
made me think, "maybe we should take a look at the Polygon tool."
The Polygon tool is a great way to draw shapes in your model.
It's real easy to use, just a couple of clicks and you can have a shape of any number of
sides, but there's some things that people just don't know about the Polygon tool.
First thing is that sometimes the Polygon tool hides.
If I look up here I don't actually have the Polygon tool anywhere on my toolbar.
It's actually nested in with the Rectangle tool.
If I click down on this little down arrow next to the Rectangle tool I get a little
fly out and at the bottom is polygon.
So like I said, using the Polygon tool is pretty simple.
If I click and drag I'm drawing a polygon.
That's all there is to it.
Right now I'm drawing a six sided polygon.
If I look down in the lower right corner while I'm not drawing it tells me the number of
sides that I'm going to draw.
If I want to change that I type in "5" hit Enter, and I'm drawing a five sided polygon.
"3" Enter, and I'm drawing a triangle.
So it's pretty simple to define the number of sides you want to draw beforehand, but
what do you do if you're in the middle of drawing and decide you need to change the
number of sides?
If you hold down the option key on Mac or the Control key on Windows and hit the "+"
or "-" key you can actually increase or decrease the number of sides as you draw.
So that's a great way if you forgot to set that and you're drawing and don't want to
let go of the mouse button or something like that.
You can change that.
Another nice option with the Polygon tool is to change how you're actually drawing it.
So we have the ability to put in a dimension right now, which is going to, in this case,
be what's called the inscribed radius.
That's the measurement from the middle point, the point that I picked first, to one of the
corners.
I can change this so I'm actually drawing to one of the sides rather than one of the
corners by just tapping the option or Control key.
If I do that, you can see that little dotted circle there showing me the distance of the
radius.
My polygon jumped from inside that circle to outside that circle and gives me the dimension
to a side rather than a corner.
So it's a real quick and easy way to change how you're drawing depending on the dimension
you need.
So if I want to draw a specific size.
I want to draw a triangle that's going to fit in my little shape sorter here, so what
I'm going to do is I'm going to go from the middle to one of the points, and down in the
lower right corner it tells me that that is 1 1/2".
So I'm going to go back to the Polygon tool.
I'm going to type in "3" because that's the number of sides i want to draw.
I'm going to start drawing out.
I can use the option key to switch inside or outside, so I'm on the inside and I'm going
to type "1.5"" And that gives me a shape that would fit right in my shape sorter.
Another thing while we're talking about drawing shapes.
If I come over here and hop into the circle command, just like with the Polygon tool I
can set the number of sides i want to create a circle with.
Generally speaking, something like 24 will give you a nice round circle.
Circles are circular shapes but they are still made up of segments, so if I want to drop
down to a low number like six, I can still draw what is technically a circle but with
only six sides.
Now, the reason this is nice.
Let me show you something.
If I come in here and I switch to polygon and I'll do a six sided polygon, draw it right
next to my six sided circle.
Right now they look pretty much the same.
However, if I take pull these into 3D you'll see a big difference.
Okay so what happens is with a polygon each side is distinctly different and separate
so I get these surfaces that get pulled out of there.
With a circle, even though it looks like a polygon it's actually all welded together
so when I pull it up it sees this as a single surface.
So this is a great tip if you're doing something like you're modeling something for 3D and
you want to keep a circle but you don't want to have a whole bunch of sides, simplify it,
you can decrease the number of sides on a circle it's going to simplify your geometry.
Or if you're working in a big model where you don't need a whole lot of detail but you're
trying to keep your polygon count down, you can do that by modeling with a low number
of sides on a circle.
So, that's just a couple tips about drawing shapes.
Polygons and circles.
Thank you!