MultiCam Boardroom - Part 8

The whiteboard for the MultiCam boardroom project was designed to resemble a submarine hatch. Of course, we needed a pen holder to go along with it — and it needed to fit to the room’s theme. After sketching a few ideas we settled on a design that resembled one of those vacuum tube deals, where messages are sent through pipes. Our design includes plenty of pipes, rivets, some Victorian style cast brackets and a pressure gage for good measure! We dug through our bin of spare plumbing pieces, measured everything up and then designed some flanges and bracket pieces to be routed from MDF. The rivets were routed from 30 lbs. Precision Board HDU.

After cutting and glueing the pieces together we laid on a coat of primer to add a little texture and age. The gage will need to be fabricated but we went ahead and fastened the pen holder to the wall.

As I mentioned, each rivet is machined from 30 lbs. Precision Board HDU. After gluing on the 300th rivet we are starting to question the sanity of our design. Nevertheless, all those tiny pieces add add a great deal to the project!

MultiCam Boardroom - Part 7

With the ribs in place our next step was to install the large sonotubes against the ceiling. These massive “pipes” are a nice bit of eye candy and will help to emphasize the curved ceiling.

Once we had the sonotubes placed it was time to seismically anchor the beams in place — five steel braces and three structural cables for each beam as per the engineer's instructions. There are no worries about these beams every coming down!

With the heavy lifting out of the way we started in on the finer details. We wanted to bring a section of the wall to a more finished state to make sure we liked it — we often work by eye on these sorts of projects. We glued and screwed the baseboards and one section of wainscotting — testing the distance between rivets.

The rapid texture generated in EnRoute looked fabulous on the wall as did the small “M” medallion which will repeat on every panel around the room.

As we did with the ribs, we used Coastal Enterprises FSC 88-WB primer (our marshmallow paint) to introduce some texture to the large pipes and wall — applying it with a 1.5" brush in a random pattern. It was a tedious job but well worth the effort.

Emblem of the Order - Part 3

In our previous instalment, we dipped our toes in and starting exploring the basic tools for drawing vector contours in EnRoute. Today, we will continue our exploration by learning to “mirror” and “weld” contours.

Drawing The Boar’s Crown

We will start drawing the crown with the rectangle tool. Place one corner at the bottom left of the crown and click a second time on the centre point of the crown. Then switch to the edit points tool and select the top left corner of your rectangle — move it over to the crown’s left-most point. Next, right click anywhere on the top of the rectangle. Choose “insert point” and create a new point. Do this two more times, then move the new points to finish drawing half of the crown.

Mirroring Contour shapes

After completing the half-crown select it with the select objects tool. Next, choose “mirror” from the “transform” drop-down menu.

A dialogue box will appear at the lower left of your screen. Make sure “mirror horizontal” and “copy” are toggled on. By default it will mirror from the bottom-left corner so be sure to mirror from the top-right, middle-right, or bottom-right (as you can see, I used the bottom-right).

Clicking apply creates a mirrored copy of the half-crown. All that remains is to weld these two half-crowns together into a single polyarc.

Welding Contour Shapes

Select both half-crowns with the select objects tool before activating the “weld joined” tool. This tool will merge any two closed polyarcs as long as they overlap (or share an edge).

As you can see, mirroring and welding polyarcs is a quick way to create almost any symmetrical shape. In fact, this is yet another method we could have used to create the shield we drew last time.

Next up, we will look at drawing polyarcs with “Bezier curves.”