EPS to Rhino Tutorial. In This tutorial, I will go through my process of modeling one of the houses from our list. It is important to begin by doing some research on the house selected even if you have a decent amount of documentation to work from the book. Hopefully, you will able to find more pictures and construction drawings; these will help you figure out more details and give you more insight as to how most components of your chosen precedent come together. It may be helpful to let you know that I will be using Adobe Illustrator CS5 and Rhino V4 SR9 for this tutorial. I will recreate the Schroder House by Gerrit Rietveld in Rhino from an EPS file. I will begin by opening the EPS file that contains the construction drawings in Illustrator. You may be get a couple of prompts asking you to update the typeface used in the document because the file that you are trying to open was created with an earlier version of Adobe illustrator, click OK and let illustrator assign any similar typeface. This will not affect the drawings at all. Now you will have to check the document s units to make sure that we are working in imperial units. Go to Edit > preferences > units. At least change the general and stroke units to inches. If you are going to be working with some text you could also change the type units to inches.
Notice that all of the images are in one artboard. I will have to create an artboard for each drawing. The Artboard Tool button (Shift+O) is located at the bottom of the tools toolbar the left. With this tool I will draw each artboard as you would draw a square For this project, I have established that an artboard of 18 x18 will be sufficient for each image. (Your dimensions may vary). If the artboard is too big in size, it can slow down Rhino when you import the pictures from illustrator. Then I will erase the green layer that just contains numbers that will not be of any use by clicking and dragging the layer into the trash can at the bottom of the window. To create a new layer just click the new layer button on the left side of the trash can at the bottom of the layer window. To rename an existing layer just double click on the layer to rename and type the new name in the box. Here you can also select a different code color to identify the elements of that layer in the workspace. I am going to use three layers to get the drawing ready to export to Rhino. I have named them Side/Plan grid, Front/plan grid and Drawings. The idea here is to just name the layers in a way that it helps you understand your work. I will change all of my drawings to the drawings layer Select the drawings, then go to the layer window and drag the small square, which represents the objects selected in that layer, click and drag the square up or down in the layer that you want the selected objects to be. Before start moving each drawing in its own artboard, I will select all the objects and ungroup (Shift+Ctrl+G) them because they are grouped in an odd way. Once I have each plan, section and elevation grouped into its own object, I can move on to the next step. The EPS file contains layers that do not organize the objects in a way that makes sense to start working with the plans and sections. I will modify and reorganize the layers to best fit my interests. If the layers window is not open go to Window > Layers (F7). The next step will be to create a grid to help us keep constant proportions across the drawings. Real measurements do not matter as much as proportions do in this step but I noticed that the drawings are not the same size. The drawings are not at the same scale. I will choose one drawing as a reference to scale the rest. I am going to use my plans as a reference to scale my elevations up and to create the grid that will help me model with those same proportions in Rhino. My drawings include a set of front and side elevations and the two floor plans. In order to keep my proportions constant in the front and side elevations, move and rotate my side elevation to match the plan I am referencing from. I will first scale every drawing so they are all the same size. I will just use a few lines
for reference. Make sure that your rulers are turned on (View > Rulers > Show Rulers. Or Ctrl+R), and check the smart guides option. This will make your guides snap to points in your plans as you draw them. Also click on one of the layers that is going to hold the grid lines to make it active and not placing guides in an incorrect layer. To draw guides vertically (shown above), click on the left ruler and drag the guide to a reference point in the drawing. I will pick the outermost points in my plan to make a boundary and size my front elevation up by dragging it by a corner and pressing shift at the same time to keep proportions. After that I can scale my drawings up or down. After I make sure that all of my drawings have the same proportions, I can start to put every drawing in a different artboard. Here I can align every object horizontally and make sure for the last time that their heights are the same. After that I can start creating a grid for each drawing. The grid should be detailed enough to let you pack the most amount of information without being too overwhelming. Here, I chose to follow walls, door frames and sometimes windows. After the grid is done in each artboard, I will need to make sure that the grid lines are able to be saved into a file that can be exported to Rhino. Guides are not lines hence they will not be saved in a file type like a jpeg or png. In order to create lines from the guides I will create a new layer. In there I will save a copy of my guides just so I keep a nondestructive workflow. I can select only the guide lines to be copied and pasted. After pasting, without deselecting the new guides change the selected guides to the new layer. Now, in order to keep the original layer in place I can lock the layer in where they are to prevent myself of accidentally moving them out of place. With the original guides locked I can align the new guides with them. I will now hide one of the layers that contain guides and stay with just one visible set of guides Now, in order to transform the guides into lines I will create a rectangle the size of the artboard, with a stroke of 0.0139 in and without a fill color. This will be the boundary that will help me transform the guides into lines and also cut them to fit the artboard. To do this, I will open up the pathfinder window. This set of tools modifies how objects interact with each other. Among the different options I will choose divide because it is the only command that considers guides as an object (generally in illustrator guides are not objects just construction lines, hence the ability to modify them is very limited.) Before applying the divide command, I will have to select the objects that are going to be divided. After dividing the selection, illustrator will group everything in it, it will give the new object a stroke and a line color that will usually be the same as the ones the rectangle had. This process needs to be repeated for every artboard.
In order to export to a file that can be easily worked on in Rhino I will go to File > Export I chose to save as a jpeg because it will give me the ability to create a small picture clear enough to use it in Rhino without slowing it down. I have to save each artboard individually. For this I will select the option Use Artboards and change the range to the artboard number that I want to save first. Now I am ready to move on to Rhino. In Rhino, I will make sure that the basic set up is already in place. Type Options in the command bar. Check that the model units are in feet and that the distance display is in feet and inches. The display precision can remain as is. Check that the dimension units are in feel and inches by opening the sublayer under the dimension section. This will be useful if I need to find out the dimensions of my model. The options window provides with a wide array of user properties that can be customizable in Rhino. Like background, grid and axis colors to more advanced things like customizing what each button of the mouse does when clicked. I found that there are two ways to place images in illustrator, Picture frame and background bitmap. I chose to use the picture frame command because it allows me to place multiple pictures at a time. It also treats each frame as a curve that can be modified in many ways easily as opposed to the background bitmap command, which is more restrictive (it basically lets you put up one image per viewport) and every time that a modification to the image is needed, I would have to type the command each time. The benefits of using the background bitmap over the picture frame are that once the picture is placed, there is no way to accidentally move it out of its place (for that the background bitmap command would have to be typed in first) and, using one picture at a time will keep Rhino running smoothly as opposed using three or four at a time. There are two ways to place pictures using background bitmap. Select the desired viewport and type background bitmap or, right click on the name of the desire viewport and go to Background Bitmap > Place. I will use picture frame because my laptop can take the extra load and also because I need to finish up quickly to meet a deadline. Picture Frame in the command box > Choose a picture > draw the rectangular frame. My frame showed up with a wrong orientation. (Holding shift while sizing the picture will keep the edges straight). I can select the frame and rotate it as if it was a rectangle in rhino.
Since I set up a system of proportions between my images in illustrator, the size of each picture does not really matter as I place them in the top view. After the pictures are placed I can start scaling them to a known dimension. From drawing conventions I know that the door width is at least 3. I could not find another way to snap to a point in the picture frame than using the point tool to place a point at the beginning and end of the door in the plan view. I will create a horizontal line 3ft long to use as scaling reference. The start of the line should be aligned with either one of the points. I will use the left one. Make sure that the point snap is turned on. Hold shift to keep the line straight. Type 3 in the command line and click to create the line. Select the picture frame and write Scale 2D in the command line to scale the picture up in the horizontal and vertical directions. The origin point will be the left point from which the picture is going to scale up. The first reference point will be the one that defines the door Since my original points were not horizontally aligned with each other, I will press shift as I select the first reference point to avoid distortions during scaling. The second reference point will be a point that will extend the line 3ft parallel to the line created before. Hold shift to keep the line straight. After following these steps, I will see how the width of the door became the same length of the 3ft line that I created before. I will repeat this process using the newly scaled picture frame as a reference to scale the other frames up to the same size. Make sure to align all the artboards. Follow the same steps to scale 2D a side of the smaller frame using the adjacent, already scaled frame, as the reference. The grid lines will line up between picture frames. Now I can put each frame next to one another to make sure that every line is matching.
Adjustments may need to be made to the scale (scale2d). This is Due to the pictures not been placed dead center on the artboard in illustrator. By using the polyline command I will trace the elevations. I can drop points in the images to have a better and faster snap if needed. It is important to trace the most detail out of the plans. This will make my life easier when working with 3d surfaces. The front elevation is the most detailed because from that information i can build many elements of the house. Also I have the benefit to be working on a house that has big planes that extend from ground to roof. The next step consists of modeling the building (at last!!!). I will create layers and sublayers to group the different elements that make up the house ( skeleton, walls, windows, doors, floor, roof, rails, etc.) I will trace each elevation, rotate them and put them together to create the building envelope. After that I will just extrude every wall in or out. Using the plan frames as reference for size and position, often using the dimension tool to get some reference measurements (some sizes may be slightly off. This is good to keep consistency.) The first step is two set up some layers to keep the work organized. On the layer window > new layer. Rename and change the color. I created layers for my skeleton (these are the traced lines from the elevations, the walls, windows, roof, floor, rails, and a layer to keep my plan picture frames separate. Create some sublayers. In my case I will create sublayers for windows, walls and rails. In the layer window, next to the layer button, click the sublayer button after selecting the layer in where the sublayer needs to be. Now I can move the plans to their own individual layer. (first floor plan and second floor plan.) I will be selecting different layers as I work in the model (if I am doing a window I will be selecting the window layer by double clicking on it in the layer window.) to keep my work organized. I will keep my viewports in ghosted so I can have better visibility between surfaces. I just had two out of three elevations to trace from. After tracing the first two, I rotated them (basically just flipped them up in the front and right view) and aligned them with my first floor plan. I can set a point on the floor plan wall corner to snap to if needed. It is important to make sure that the plan we are working on is directly aligned to the xy axis. This will help me set up reference points to snap lines into. Select the plan and shoose a corner to move from > enter > type in 0,0,0. this will place that chosen point right on the origin.
To create the missing elevation skeleton I will start by looking at pictures on the internet to have an idea of how everything comes together. I can also use the plans as reference. I will start by creating a line that runs perpendicular to my front elevation. I can use the plan to get a reference of the length of the line. I can place points in the edges of walls and windows to snap my lines. Just make sure that the line is being drawn perpendicular to the origin line.i have to make sure that the top plan is aligned with the elevation as well beacuse the windows for that elevation are in that floor. After that, I have to to select the plans and the skeleton lines and align them from the corner of the second floor to the origin so my points will be placed on top of that plan. After that just scale 1D to the point created at the edge of the wall to make the line the right length. Information given by the plan outlines two big windows and two smaller windows at either side of those. I will scale the perpendicular line with the plan to get an estimation of the size. To create my window division, I will use the array curve command. This will let me choose a path and the number of elements that need to fit in the path. Write ArrayCrv in the command box > choose the second created line as the curve to array > enter > then select first created line as a path > enter > choose the number of items to be placed on the path (3 in freeform orientation) > enter. This will give me the outside frame of each window. From here I can take measurements from the windows already created in the other elevation to complete the two big windows. The other two windows can be done similarly by looking at the plan and pictures of the actual building as reference. I will be doing the two bigger windows first. By looking at the pictures on the internet, I can determine that there is an I-Beam dividing those windows from the tiny corner windows. The plan seems to be consistent with the picture. I will place a point where those big windows are intercepted by the I-Beam. I will scale that line again but strating from the other side to bring it over and flush it with the I-beam. I will draw a line at the other end of the new line perpendicular to it to get my window divisions set up. The perspective view will not let me draw a line perpendicular up so, while still in the command, I will switch to the right ot front view to draw the line I need, which will be aligned with the outside frame of the other elevation. After most of my elevations are set up I can start to align them with my plans before extruding the walls up. Im going to start from the first floor so I will select everything again and now set a corner of my first floor plan in the origin to begin extruding walls up. The exterior walls can be extruded from each elevation. I did not complete the missing elevation because the walls extend from the bottom all the way up. I can just use the plan as a reference.
I will start extruding walls from the curves that make up the elevation. Their thickness and position can easily be estimated by looking at the plan or reference pictures. The windows have three components: the outside frame, the inside frame and the glass. I will use the same method used in the Farnsworth tutorial to extrude and then align the surfaces by the midpoints (refer to the farnsworth house tutorial in dropbox.info.) The positioning of every elelment is aided by the plan view. The floor is just a slab that runs along the bottom. The middle floor slab is placed right on the bottom of the second floor plan (about 9 feet off the ground) and giving it a thickness of 1 foot. I will then start creating the interior walls by making boxes that will come off the plans. This will not be as accurate as tracing each plan and extruding the walls up but that s okay for the purpose of this tutorial. For the missing elevation elements (a few windows and doors) I estimated them because they are similar to the ones that I have already created. (Remind that as the model is bieng built i am switching through layers and arranging elements in sublayers for better organization. The second floor will have most of its exteriorwalls already in place since they run from the bottom up. To do the interior walls of the second floor, I will have to select everything and align a corner from the second floor plan into the 0,0,0 coordinate so that my boxes are created in that plan. All I need to do here is to create the balconies, railings and do some more windows and doors (which again are very similar to the ones already created). For the balcony floor is already traced in my elevation so I can just extrude it out and define its length by using the plan. The railings are made similarly. I determined thir location by looking at pictures over and over again. Then I extruded the railings from the plan and used the same height value as thier width. After that I will move the rialings out to a point over the edge of the balcony floor. Finally for the railings, I will create the sides which are just a copy rotated perpendicularly and scaled down to flush with the closest wall. For this railing I forgot to change the layer I was working on to the one set up for railings. I will do that by selecting my railings and, on the layer window, right click in the railing layer and choose the Change objects to layer option.
The roof is a slab traced out of the front elevation. I am going to start by extruding the front slab from the elevation and extending it until I hit the first wall that cuts it. Then I will create a rectangle on the back face of that new surface that will extend until the intersection with the wall and extrude again until I hit the wall on the back. The rest of the roof will extrude out of a rectangle created on the side of the two new surfaces out until it hits the next intersecting wall. Finally, the small roof section on top of one of the balconies can be created similarly. To create the hole in one of the walls in the front elevation, I will extrude the circle from the skeleton to the same thickness of the wall that is in. Use the Boolean Split command > select the surface to split > select the cutting object > after that, the command will keep both objects but it will create a split where those two or more objects intersect. In order to see them, I will delete the small cylinder. I notice that the hole is not visible yet because there is another surface covering it; I delete that surface and I see that the opening has been created. Now that the main elements of the building are almost complete, I can add some colors to the exterior of the building. On the layer window there is a slightly gray circle just after the color in each layer. Click on it to open the material editor window > under basic change the color to anything you want. For this wall I will choose white. (In order to actually see the white I will have to give the color some glossiness. 2 will be fine.)
The material color will be applied to any object in that layer. The layer color will not rendered. By default, Rhino will assign a white color witout any gloss to every object created. If I switch to render view I can see the objects actual colors. In my example, I have different colors for my walls so I will use the sublayers to assign a different color to each set of walls. This will keep my layer window relatively small and more organized. For white colors to show up in the rendering, the glosiness of the white will have to be changed to a value of 2. For the glass panels I will just change the transparency to a value of 50 Finally, if I want to render the picture, I will have to set up a view and change the camera size. Lets say, I want to recreate the view of the picture I have in the first page of this tutorial. I will have to change the camera lens size. The idea here is to pick a size that resembles the human eye s vision. A 17mm or 25mm will do the job for this picture. I will choose a 25mm camera lens. (the lower the lens size, the more perspective distortion I get.) After that I will have to change the position of the camera in the viewport to match it with the photograph s. In most cases, I will have to set up a perpendicular line 5.5 to 6 feet high to resemble the point of view of a person. If i want to save multiple views to render later, or if I want to keep the view but some changes in the model need to be made, i can right click on the view name and choose Set View > Named Views. Choose a name for the view. If i want to use that view > right click on the viewport name > set view > choose your view from the list. To render the picture, I click on render in the menu bar then click render in the dropdown menu. The specifics of rendering will be covered in another tutorial.