Drawing a Free Plane
Free Planes are polygon surfaces and allow free entry of points in the 3D space.
To add a Free Plane, click the third (polygon) button in the Layer Manager’s top bar. This will present a controller where the following parameters can be adjusted:
- Name
A helpful name should be entered here to allow for easy recognition of the layer within the sources list. There are times when the name will have prefixes or suffixes appended, depending on how the layer was created:
“Copy of” … - prefix appended when the visual layer was duplicated.
“Continue of” … - prefix appended when the visual layer was continued.
“Mirror of” … - prefix appended when the visual layer was mirrored.
… “- Imported” – suffix appended when the visual layer was imported.
- Points Table
Enter rows into the table to create points using the green ‘plus’ icon. The minimum number of points used to describe a Free Plane is 3.
The round checkboxes in the Fit column determine whether a point is used for fitting (checkbox is checked) or whether it is only projected to the fitted surface (checkbox is unchecked). It can be toggled by a mouseclick and is checked when it is solid green.
In the leftmost column, warnings and errors concerning specific points are indicated. Details are shown as a tooltip when hovering the cursor above the warning or error icon. Data entered as part of the points table is checked and processed by System Optimiser’s Polygon Point Fitting algorithm.
Remove points using the red ‘trash bin’ icon. The last three points cannot be removed as this is the minimum number of points required to describe a Free Plane.
- Colour
A colour picker is shown. Clicking and dragging the mouse pointer around this will set adjust the tint of the base plane. There are two sliders below the colour picker which adjust hue and alpha (transparency).
- Transformations
- Ear Height
Add an audience listening height to the layer. This will be drawn in light blue in the 3D View.
- Warnings and Errors
Due to the free nature of this layer type, a variety of warnings and error messages can be provoked. Please refer to Errors and Warnings for a list of them.
Warning
It may happen that you observe an Internal Error. These happen from time to time due to the complexity of calculations involving polygons. We are constantly working on eliminating those and you can greatly help us by reporting details (i.e. the list of points) to us (see Contact the System Optimiser Team.)