KLAD – Entertainment Design

Whats a set designer to do to celebrate the Spring Mating Ritual? What will the lighting design look like for the same? These are the questions that we ponder as the weather turns warm, even if warmer than usual and foggy as we write this. Well, Easter Eggs can be fun, and decorated to the hilt.

This might take a few posts. The first question is “What is the shape of an egg?” It is not an oval, ellipse, or a circle. Yes they are all different and an egg is not an oval, even if they have the derivation. It is close enough to a circle in plan view that we won’t model with Revolve with Rail. To model an egg, we’ll use a simple Sweep command. But first the profile. We only need one side of the egg to make it 3D. We could use a full egg, but the model would be a mess.

Warning, this is pretty nerdy.

An Egg has a nominal proportion of 2:2.625. It is always amazing how objects in nature are so close to the Golden Proportion. In Vectorworks, I started with the 1′ by 2 5/8″ rectangle on the right. I’m working in the front view and on the Layer Plane. I added the 1″ by 1″ rectangle on the left. I used absolute positioning to place these objects. I drew the 45° line as a guide and I added the full circle as an illustration of the geometry. If you start with that circle and the line, the shape is readily scalable.

I then drew the three arcs filled with pale yellow and lavender. It is Easter after all. Those arcs have a Magenta Pen Color for clarity. You should be able to see the centers of those arcs and then easily draw them, snapping to one another as you go.

With this geometry, I can now easily extrapolate as much of the rest of the egg as I like. This is pretty close to the size of a chicken egg, so I could select the three arcs that define the the outline, Compose into a shape and Offset between 1/32 and 1/16th of an inch using the Offset Original Object mode, with Close open Curves. That would give me the geometry to model a hollow shell. I could use and offset of the outline to create the ‘white’ of the egg. I can add a yoke with either a sweep or a Sphere Object.

But I’m not going to do any of that. This is eventually about the pretty. Some thing you can do with Vectorworks, but not Paas.

Shift Select the three arcs and go to Modify>Compose to create one shape from the three. Note that the yellow fill now fills the all of new object. By Default, the yellow fill will become Object Attribute Texture. We’ll change that in a subsequent post about this same model.

With the new half egg object selected, go to Model>Sweep and with the defaults selected, click OK. And now you have easily created a 3D egg object.

Note that in the Sweep Dialogue, you can change the amount of the rotation, creating a partial sweep, kind of like a quarter orange peel or similar. You can also change the Pitch of the sweep which allows for the creation of some unique objects.

As always, experiment.

Easter Egg

You should end up with something just like this, once rendered in Final Quality Renderworks. Of course, you can get rid of all of the guide objects. We will do that as well.

Next up, we will light the egg and then make textures.

Of course, there are many other tips and techniques like this described in my new book Entertainment and Lighting Design with Vectorworks Spotlight available from Nemetschek Vectorworks.

Entertainment and Lighting Design with Vectorworks Spotlight takes the reader from simple techniques like this through the process of designing the sets and lights for a Broadway show.

Need Help? Post any Vectorworks related question in the comments section. Kevin will post his answers here. Yes, I committed Kevin to this – KM

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