Now I’m ready to start designing the air hockey paddle. I’ll begin by drawing a solid cylinder. The solid cylinder tool is available in the Primitives panel on the Home tab of the 3D Modeling workspace. You’ll find a flyout with all the solid primitive tools. The box tool is displayed by default but the flyout will update to display whatever tool you used last. If you’re a keyboarder, you can use the command alias CYL (CYLINDER command).
Drawing a cylinder feels very much like drawing a circle. Compare the prompts. You can create a circle based on 3 points, 2 points, or 2 tangents and a radius in addition to the default option which requires you to specify the center and radius.
You can create a cylinder using the same options (3P, 2P, Ttr). In addition, the cylinder tool includes an Ellipse option that enables you to create an elliptical cylinder (similar to drawing an ellipse). For now, I’ll use the simple and familiar default option by specifying a center and radius for the cylinder.
If you know exactly where and what you want the cylinder to look like, you can pick exact points or enter specific values for the center and radius (just like drawing a circle). But, if you’re in the conceptual design phase and starting with a blank drawing, that may be more information than you know. Fortunately, it’s easy to modify the cylinder even after you create it. I’ll quickly (and sloppily) pick two points to specify the center and radius. It feels and looks just like a circle doesn’t it? Except now, because it’s a three dimensional cylinder instead of a two dimensional circle, it’s prompting for height. You can pick a point or enter a value.
From the top view, the height isn’t obvious. Even after I specify a height, it just looks like a circle. When you work in 3D, you’ll want to view your model from different angles, not just from the top as we’re used to in 2D design. 3D viewing and navigation is an entire topic on its own but you don’t have to learn everything there is to know about it in order to get started with 3D modeling. I’ll point out key tools along the way. For example, one of my favorite viewing tools is Orbit. You can orbit the model by pressing the Shift key and middle mouse button and moving the mouse. The orbit symbol appears at the cursor and you can easily and intuitively adjust your view of the model.
- Cylinder tool (CYL command alias) creates a 3D cylinder similar to creating a 2D circle with height
- Shift key and middle mouse button enable you to orbit the model