Oblique view (Plan oblique 45 degrees)

 From:  Michael Gibson
3845.8 In reply to 3845.7 
Hi Rado,

> Could you maybe elaborate as to how I would go about
> squishing it to make it look right? I can't seem to wrap
> my head around this...

Well, I guess you want to apply a kind of shearing effect. MoI does not have an actual "Shear" command, but Rhino does so you could use Rhino to help out with this. You would apply the Shear command in Rhino twice since it shears in 1 direction at a time, so you would do it something like once in the front view and once in the side view to turn something like a cube into a slanted shape that still had the top and bottom faces parallel.

If your model is built up of simple extrusions, then you can apply that kind of shearing in MoI by some control point manipulation.

To do that, first break the model into individual surfaces using the Edit > Separate command.

Then select just the "side wall pieces" by going to the front view and doing a window selection starting from the right and going towards the left to do a "crossing selection" which will select anything that touches the selection window. Then turn on control points with Edit > Show pts. That should look like this:



Then you want to clear the selection and then select just the top face and the top set of control points of the side pieces, that looks like this:



Then you want to move those over diagonally to produce a slanted shape like this:



Then you'll take your snapshot from the Top view:




To produce the side-wall lines of the particular 2D length that you want, use the Move command to move the top row of stuff - click anywhere in the top view for the base point for the move and for the target point of the move you can use polar coordinate notation to enter in a distance and angle for the target point. You enter in polar coordinates by typing in a number then the < sign, then the angle, so for example if you want to shift it by a distance of 5 at an angle of 45 degrees, type in 5<45 for the 2nd point in the Move command.

- Michael