If you want to present your project in a special way, you can achieve this by applying styles. In this lesson, I’ll show you what it’s really all about.

Changing the currently applied style can be a very simple process. It is enough to choose another option from the palette at the top of the screen instead of the default style (Shaded with Texture). If you choose the first one from the left (Shaded), all textures will be removed from the screen, and if you choose the next icon (Hidden Line), the complete project will be displayed in the form of a drawing. The next option (Wireframe) allows you to display elements that are in the background, and you can achieve a similar effect if you return to the basic style and turn on the Back Edges option. The X-Ray option works in the same way, and if you don’t like this style of display, you will have to click on the same icon again to turn it off.

I’ll go back to the default style and on the right side of the screen look for the section with the same name (Style). As you can see, there are already several options in it, and if I click on this icon and start the In Model option, the selection will be reduced to only one item, the one that represents the currently active style (Construction Documentation Style).

If you want to present your project in the form of a drawing and you don’t like what the Hidden Line option offers, open this menu and look for the Sketchy Edges item. After that, a series of new shortcuts will appear in this section, each of them allowing you to apply the appropriate style. To show you how it looks in practice, I will randomly activate some of these styles and you pay attention to the effects that can be achieved. As you can see, these are line drawings that differ from each other in the thickness of the line, the length of individual segments, and the way they end. I like the style called Pencil with Endpoints the most, and in practice, Fineliner, which is very similar to it, is often used. It is characterized by slightly curved lines that overlap each other, so the whole display looks very much like a sketch made by hand.

If you have found a suitable style and want to save the current view, you can achieve this by creating a new scene. To that end, I will open the corresponding section and click on the icon with the plus sign, and the program will warn me that this operation may affect the currently active parameters. It doesn’t suit me, so I will choose the Do nothing to save changes option and create a new scene with one click.

Now that I’ve successfully saved this view, I can go back to the style sheet and select the item called Style Builder Competition from it. As you can see there are styles here too that mimic hand made sketches, and I’ll do my best to find something that can serve to represent the entire object. So I’ll switch to the exterior first and then turn off the tag that’s connected to the ceiling. In the end, I should get a very nice drawing that includes the entire object, so I will try to save it as a separate scene.

If you prefer drawings that are made of straight lines, select the Straight Lines item and try some of the offered options. I’m going to take the opportunity to check how all of this would look in different colors, so to that end I’ll first select the Color Sets item and then activate some of the styles that fall into this category. It seems to me that all this has gone too far, so by selecting the Photo Modeling item, I will return to the line view, which is suitable for subsequent interventions, and check whether it suits my needs. It looks like the style I had at the beginning was the best, so I’ll go back to Default Styles and click on the option called Shaded with Texture. Now that everything is in place, it wouldn’t hurt to rotate the entire model a bit more and finally create the final scene.

Before I finish this lesson, I would like to remind you of what I have done so far. That’s why by selecting the Rendering item, I will return to the initial scene and then move to a view that is composed exclusively of line elements in one move. The next scene includes the complete model rendered in a similar way, only to finally have all the elements reappear in a mode that involves the application of different colors and textures. I could have achieved the same effect by selecting the first scene (Top View), but I wanted to show you how you can easily display the same model in several different ways.

If you want to check which styles you have used so far, you can do so by selecting the Home icon. After that, a series of options belonging to different categories will appear in front of you, which in my case means that this section will be filled with a large number of new icons. Since I only need styles that are related to existing scenes at this point, I’ll try to declutter this list a bit. To that end, I need to click on the icon called Details and select the Purge Unused option from the menu. After that, the entire selection will be reduced to only four styles – Construction Documentation Style – which is part of the original project, Fineliner – which I used for the drawing in scene no. 5, Pencil Edges – for exterior drawing and Shaded with Texture as a regular display in many different scenes.