Defining Bottom

Let’s keep using the dieline we made in the last tutorial, just set both crease lines angles back to 90°:

Reload it in Origami to make sure it looks like this:

If everything looks pretty much the same on your side, let’s start.

Bottom Marker

In order to select a proper part of the dieline as a bottom plane, Origami needs your help. If you make a path named “Bottom” somewhere in the dieline, Origami will use the part with the marker as the bottom part.

Make sure you put the marker into the Origami layer and name it exactly “Bottom” (case doesn’t matter). Origami will not treat it as the part of the dieline, so the line style and shape don’t really matter. What matters is the center of the marker which is used to select the bottom part.

Here I added the marker to the middle panel:

The marker has no stroke at all and is of a pink color, but it doesn’t really matter to Origami, it just reads its name. Here’s what I get when I refresh the shape in Origami:

As you see the middle part of the shape is now on the floor, while both side parts point up. Try placing the marker to side panels and see what is changed in Origami.

More Markers?

Origami supports two more markers: “Front” and “Top”. They work the same way, yet define the front and top panels correspondingly. Here I added the Front marker to our dieline:

Again, the style and color of the added element don’t matter, only the name. Here is the updated scene in Origami:

The shape looks rotated, but how it works? In Origami the X axis goes right, Y axis goes away from the camera, and Z axis goes up. The front marker aligns the shape so it faces against the Y axis, and as long as the camera looks along the Y axis — the shape faces the camera. If this sounds too complex, never mind. Both bottom and front markers properly fix the generated shape, so even if you change the dieline, it will be correctly positioned after refreshing. Without markers, Origami may select a different starting part and the shape may appear rotated.

Now lets change “bottom” in the marker name to “top” and refresh the shape in Origami:

The middle panel now faces up, as there is a “top” marker on it instead of the “bottom”. Note that the front face is still the same, as we didn’t change the “Front” marker.

Marker Conflicts

What if you put both top and bottom markers onto the same part? The part cannot face both top and bottom at the same time. In order to avoid such conflicts, Origami processes the markers this way:

1. It looks for the bottom marker and faces its part down;
2. It looks for the top marker and faces its part up;
3. It looks for the front marker and faces its part front.

This is a pretty simple scheme of avoiding conflicts. If both top and bottom markers are defined, the top marker works second and overrides the bottom one. There is no need to provide all the three markers, two is more than enough.

What’s Next?

Now as you finished with markers, it is time to try adding multiple shapes to the scene. Click the link below to start.

• Multiple Shapes — how to have several objects in the same scene;
• Dieline Generator — make dielines faster with the online generator;
• Export and Rendering — learn to export scenes or render them.

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