Exploded Axonometric Drawing in Rhino

hello and welcome to this video tutorial on creating an exploded axonometric drawing in rhino we're going to be using this reference by morphosis as an example reference for this

particular tutorial looking at how to break apart a building or a construction design into its key components using the axonometric projection as a way of displaying this

and pulling apart each of the elements of the construction as shown in this reference here now i've made a simple flat model here where we've broken it up

into our key floors we've modeled our windows doors we've got staircases in there as well as well as that you can see i've modeled in the beams

in between the walls as well just to give it that extra level of detail so we've got some components to break apart when we explode this out as well as this i've also broken each of

the external walls down into a wall for each side so we've kind of broken out down our left hand wall our front walls and our sidewalls as well

if you've created your model by extruding up your walls and they're kind of attached as a single loop you can easily split these apart and the way i kind of broke apart my walls

was just by creating a vertical plane and i just sort of drew the plane out where i wanted to split my walls up there and then selected the walls i

wanted to split and use the split tool here and selected that plane and it just cut those walls along that edge to give me separated walls that i can

then start to move out perpendicular to that direction so we can start to explode that out now with everything modeled and everything in place i now want to start

exploding or pulling apart my geometry to show this exploded axonometric drawing as you can see in the reference it's quite important that we keep the distance we're moving each of the objects the same

that way we're going to get this nice kind of laid out exploded drawing where every element is kind of pulled out by exactly the same amount of figure for this particular model here

i'm going to just select an element and test out kind of how far i think i should kind of be pulling these out just by looking at my kind of millimeters at the bottom to see what distance they're going

and i think about three or four meters will be about right for this particular model now to ensure i'm kind of always pulling out a consistent amount i'm actually going to just create a line here

and we're going to make this line a kind of dimension of three meters long so let's say we'll make it 21 meters long for now 21 meters or maybe let's make it 30

actually just to give us some room to play with 30 meters long like so and then within that line i'm going to

select it and i'm going to divide it into segments of 3 meters so that's going to divide it by 10 like so there so each of these segments

is now three meters in distance now what we can do is i'm actually going to take this line in these segments and we're just going to make a copy

of them i'm going to rotate it 90 degrees and we're just going to copy it around our building and this is going to be our guide to help us explode out

our axonometric drawing from each point and make sure these distances are locked in it doesn't really matter where on this line they go as long as they're kind of joined to the base plate like so so

everything has a similar starting point just so there's a consistency when you're doing this drawing now so we'll just copy that round and i

think what i also do is we're going to take these lines and the points involved on them just making sure i select them all and we're just going to move them onto

my guideline layer see i've got a layer here called guide and i'm actually i'm going to make a new one just for this so they don't get confused in my 2d drawing there and this is so when i go

to do my make 2d i can just hide this layer and make sure it's not getting caught up with the rest of them and i can lock this as well so we've got our guides in place and we can't accidentally select them now

so this is going to help us in our exploded drawing i think actually as well as well as your kind of horizontal motions we also want the these lines for our vertical

exploded areas as well so i'm just going to make a copy of these and move them downwards one for the bottom and one for the top here

i'll just join into that piece by now so this has given us our kind of guidelines for exploding out our drawing and now we can start pulling our pieces apart now what i think i'm going to do

for this is i'm just going to lock my 3d geometry here so i can't accidentally move it and i'm going to move my guidelines up to the very

center of the model because we're going to take the center point as our kind of center of our exploded drawing and we're going to explode out from the center floor

outwards i think as well let's move these vertical ones up too so they're all kind of exploding from this central point that way we've kind of got given

ourselves an origin point for our exploded axo drawing that we can then pull each part from and start to kind of deconstruct our drawing from there so

there we go i'm happy with that now what we can do is we can start taking apart our walls and we're going to do this incrementally

for each wall now for each one we can just select the wall and now using our guides we can just use this to incrementally pull it apart by stages of

three meters and it could be quite a sort of slow process you can do a sort of few at a time and we can always kind of take multiple floors sort of the floor below

as well and move them all simultaneously out so it's a bit quicker but we're just going to use the guidelines to help us do this and we're just going to start to pull

apart each of these key pieces of our building so we're essentially just deconstructing it in incremental phases i would say that it's probably good to save your

model before you do this so you've got a kind of whole model at this point before you start deconstructing it because it can be quite hard to put together again something i also want to add is for

these walls here i actually want to show that they're not going to be completely solid they might have a layer of brick on one side and a layer of block work in the middle so i'm actually going to just divide them in half

and to do that i'm just going to check the distance though 300 ml so we're going to make a box 100 mil wide and we're going to just use this to cut

out the center part of our model so i'm just going to copy this in the middle and this is going to be our insulation this block here so what we'll do is we'll just select

our three walls two three we'll do a boolean difference and then we'll drop out our insulation there and you see that that's now cut out our

center wall we can then select our walls again here and i'm just going to make a copy

so we've also now got three layers here and for that central layer we're going to move it onto a new layer called insulation so basically just splitting our wall

apart into its key pieces is made up of let's make a new layer insulation and we'll give this a color too

and just change the layer that's on so you can see that it's the insulation layer much like in this reference drawing you can see that the walls are kind of pulled apart into their kind of component pieces

we're going to be doing the same thing so now we've got these triple layers we can then select the outer layer move this one out just using our guide i'm going to move this out by six meters

because we're gonna then want to move the insulation out by three meters as well and always use the dots to pull it out

so you're kind of pulling out each of these key component pieces as we go so i'm just going to pause the video and just move out the rest of these walls and then we'll restart it and have

a look at that so now we've broken down the horizontal exploded elements of the walls and you can see here i've broken right down to the windows on the side and we've got the insulation

and each layer and the columns on the outer layer as well so each side is now broken up what i'm now going to do is do the vertical elements and anything internal

and all the floors and walls are going to be exploded vertically upwards so i'm just leaving the external walls for the horizontal axes which are exploding and then anything internal is

going either up or down and we'll take it from anywhere from this first floor is going upwards and anything on the ground floor there is going downwards too so we're just going to start by

pulling up each of these pieces incrementally you'll see i expanded the spaces and i actually ended up offsetting each one by six meters instead of three meters because i decided as i was going that it

needed a slightly wider area to pull it out from so we're going to do the same with this and just start pulling it up by increments of six meters just starting with the roof here and i'm

just going to pause the video again and explode those vertical elements now so now we've extruded out and pulled out our vertical elements

of our exploded axo and you can see here we've got each of the pieces down to the beams and the doors pulled up vertically you'll see that because of my central flat we've kind of got left with these

internal walls and doors in the center now you could move these off left and right and kind of horizontally or vertically if you wanted to i'm actually going to leave these here because the last thing i'm going to do

before i turn this into a drawing is actually model in the kind of ghost of my original building as a sort of dotted line in the center of this exploded accent as you can see here in the reference

it's got a kind of outline of the original form so we can see what the kind of original form was before i exploded all these pieces out so we're going to do the same and to do that i'm just going to

take a copy of my floor plate at the bottom here we're going to move it vertically back up just copying it and aligning it to the bottom here and

i'm going to make a new layer for these and we're going to call it excellent like so and we're just going to move this object

onto that axo outline layer so it's selected in the correct place then i'm going to just copy this vertically upwards just to align to each of my floor plates

using the horizontal ones as a guide there and we need to give it a roof as well and then with those pieces we're actually just going to draw using the line tool

draw these out as a series of 2d lines so they don't actually hide any of the geometry below now to do that i'm just going to isolate these pieces so just selecting the

light bulb icon here and using the isolate objects just to sort of hide everything else and isolate these and then in this outline i'm just going to use the polyline tool and we're going to just draw out these

outlines from there once i've got one we can take that and we can copy it down so we can see each of the floors there and then i'm just going to draw a line

connecting each of the ones from top to bottom like so so just a very simple outline just to kind of give us the original form that we can then refer

back to once you've got those lines we can delete out the floors like so and then once you've got them to un-isolate just select the objects go back

and select right click on isolate we can go back so you can see we've got our kind of original form that everything was coming out from there now one thing i might do this as

well is we're just going to give everything a little bit more space just because as we look at it from the axo we don't want anything sort of hiding any of the elements so i'm just going to move

everything out by one point here and we'll just go around and quickly move out all these objects by one just to give everything a little bit

more space because sometimes these drawings can get quite cramped up and you want to make sure that all the elements are visible

when you do these exploded axo drawings and just by kind of spacing stuff off by one you can just help that process out a little bit

and just select these move these vertically up and remember each time we're just using the dots and the guides to make sure we're moving it incrementally by the same amount

so everything's set there we go so i think that is basically the drawings now kind of ready to be made out into our 2d drawing so what we can do now and i mean you could

add more detail in this you can see here we've got kind of some elements are broken down into even more parts you could take apart the windows i think for this particular example we're just going to keep it like this for now but by all means you can kind of

take this into as much detail as you want and you could zoom in on elements if you wanted to as well so now we've got this what we're going to do is we're going to turn this into an axon metric drawing and if you've seen my previous tutorials

to get an accent on the metric drawing we can't achieve that using rhino's built-in kind of 3d viewer we have to actually distort the model to achieve that effect

so what we're going to do is we're going to hide our guidelines because we don't need those anymore and then we're going to select all our objects here we're going to just make a

copy of them over on the right and we're going to make sure we save our file as well before we do this so we've got two copies once we've made that copy we're then

going to select it we're going to go back to the top view here and we're just going to rotate it by 45 degrees and then in the front view with those

objects selected we're going to type in shear and we're going to shear this selecting a point any point kind of at the bottom of the model and at a point exactly vertically above

it and it doesn't matter how high or how low we go as long as it's kind of vertically situated above that first point and then we're going to shear it by minus 45 degrees and you can see there it's kind of

sheered it back on itself and this is to achieve that axonometric projection look so you can see here now in the top view we're getting that and we're going to

spin it background by 90 degrees move it across a little bit and now we have our axonometric view of our model what we can do now is we can select that

model and i'm just going to now do a make 2d to turn this into a 2d drawing now what this make to do i'm going to make sure i select this scene silhouette as well because this is going to allow

us to have a nice outline on our exploded axo which would be quite a useful tool to use as well and make sure you also maintain the source layers because we can then add line weights to each of the objects depending on what

layer they're on

okay and we'll let that load out and that's our exploded axo drawing now made over here with each of our line

weights so now we've got this what we can do is we can start to turn these and add these to the line weighted layers we've already set up now in this drawing and previously i've gone through setting up these line

weights so please go back and watch that drawing if you haven't seen it already but what we're going to do is we're just going to move all these layers and all these kind of lines onto a new line weighted layer depending on

the kind of thickness i want to give the lines now in my make 2d you can see when we've done that make 2d drawing we get this series of make 2d layers and because we selected that scene

silhouette if i turn this off you can see everything now has a nice outline which would be really useful if we're then going to be coloring in our objects or kind of adding any elements to those as well

so or kind of adding a thicker line potentially around them as well so we'll just hide the scene silhouette for now and we're just going to select the curves and we're going to move these

onto a new layer now i want to make sure my outline here is on a dotted line type so maybe on this annotation or my above layer there so i'm going to

select that one first so let's find that in my make 2d so in my curves option under axon outline we'll select those

objects and we're just going to move those onto my above i think to give it that dotted line and once we're done we're going to hide these 2d linework layers so we can see

which ones we've moved now i think for my external walls my 2d line work

select these objects going to move these onto my elevation but my slightly medium-sized elevation because they're external walls we want the light to be a little bit thicker

for those and then for the internal walls and these other pieces we're going to move on to the thin elevation line i think actually let's do the floors as well

select the objects and we're just going to move those onto a slightly thicker line the elevation mid as well and then the rest of these we can move on

to the elevation fin line like so so these are all moved on to their correct line weights now we can turn that back on and we can see that there now for the

outline let's give it a kind of thicker outline too so we'll turn back on that scene silhouette outline like so select the objects

and we'll just put that on a kind of section mid line weight too now we've added line weights to all our layers and then we should end up with a drawing that looks something like this

and we can go to a layout page and we'll just find that drawing we've made set it up there make sure your print display is turned on and there you can see we've now got our

kind of line weighted axonometric drawing it might be that that outline is a bit thick so you can turn it off and it might be that you want to sort of play around with the line weights depending on how you've set it we can

always bring this in into illustrator to kind of illustrate out more and add more elements too it might be that you want to color each of these elements out or add in any line work to show that they're coming from this kind of made piece in the

middle but those are the steps of going through how to make a axonometric drawing in rhino hope that was helpful and please watch any of my other videos if you want to see any other tutorials on 3d modelling or 2d

drafting in rhino thanks for watching