ARDI Model Creation

Welcome to the tutorial – this will be a step-by-step guide to creating your first 3D model and set of skins to import into ARDI.

We are going to use three packages during this tutorial – now is a good time to download them all.

1) Blender, an open source 3D modelling program
2) Gimp, an open source 2D graphics editor
3) ARDI Model Packager, an Optrix application used to bundle everything together

These applications are completely free, and the first two are both open source and cross-platform (currently the ARDI Model Packager only works on Windows).

Note that you can feel free to use other 3D modelling and image editing packages (we suggest Adobe Photoshop for image editing). We are mainly using these two packages because they are extremely easy to obtain.

Let’s keep this quite simple to start with – we are going to create the flow-tube for a magnetic flow meter (in the picture, it’s the stainless steel part below the green ‘head’) to add to our ARDI virtual environment.

Once you have your tools, we’ll begin with creating your shape…

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