Creating Custom wheels in ZModeler This small tutorial describes how to create custom wheels in ZModeler. As an example that will be illustrated, I'll create a 5-rims wheel. Make sure your copy of ZModeler has ZSplines plugin. Start ZModeler. Choose Create...\Spline...\Linestrip tool and draw with left mouse clicks the following figure on the front view. This is a section of the wheel. Then choose Create...\Surface...\Revolution\ tool. This tool creates a surface by rotating a spline over a point in 3D space. Thus we shall rotate this section and create a wheel-template. After you have seleted this tool, ZModeler switches to Splines level. You need to click on the spline, then switch to Side view and click ones to pick the point of rotation. Notice, that the second click sets a point of rotation (and a view of rotation) and you should click somewhere like on the image: A dialog box will appear where you should enter the Name of the object and intermediate steps. Since I'm creating a 5 rims wheel, I've entered 10 intermediate steps: And in coming questions Cap Start? and Cap End? you should answer yes. Now the wheel have been created. But as a rule, the object might be reoriented: ... and as you might guess the object should be reoriented. But first of all you need to delete spline since it might crash the program. Choose Modify...\Delete tool, activate the spline and click on it. The spline is deleted and you can swicth to Objects level by unpressing splines button in toolbar: Now to reorient the wheel you choose the Modify...\Reorient tool and click on object ones. The object is normally oriented now: To create rims I shall delete some sections of the wheel. Since I've used 10 intermediate steps while creating the object and need 5 rims, than I'll delete each second of them. But before that I'll hide all unneccesary faces, and it will simplify my work. Switch object to faces level (by hitting Faces level button and then clicking on the object). Then choose Select...\Quadr tool and switch to front view. Right-click and drag to draw the rectangle area like that: Then choose Display...\Hide tool, press SEL button (to indicate that you will work with selected group) and click in the view to hide selected faces: Now it will be more easier to delete unneccesary faces. Look on the image, where I have painted the faces that I'll delete. (Of cause you need to select them): Choose Modify...\Delete tool, and since SEL button still pressed you can click in the view to delete selected faces. Now I shall adjust the rims. This will be done by moving verties, thus I switch to vertices level. Then choose Modify...\Move tool and upress SEL button. The following image illustrates how shall I move the vertices: ...and as a result you got something like that: Well, it's practically ready but I'll make one more modification: Select the group of vertices that is in the middle of the wheel. Place the axis center there by the tool Display...\Place Axis and click (exactly) in the ceter of the wheel (in the middle of that group). And push SEL button: Now choose Modify...\Rotate tool, click and drag mouse up to rotate these vertices. Just like this: Now you can switch to faces level, unhide all faces using Display...\UnHide tool and deselect all faces using Select...\None tool. Finally we got the wheel like this:

Copyright © Oleg M. 2000 as a part of ZModeler documentation. Thanks to Mat Allin for idea of that tutorial.