Subtitles of the Movie

Carrara is an extremely robust 3D application. It's go very good modelers and multiple modelers to help assist you in creating whatever it is you imagine and create animations or still renderings with it. But in addition to having those great modeling tools, Carrara also has the ability to import a wide Array of existing 3D objects; things that are available for free on the web. Sometimes you pay for them through services like Turbo Squid or DAZ has its own store where you can buy objects and bring them in. Let me show you how you do that so you can get even more utility out of this outstanding program. I've got a basic scene set up here and you'll need access to the Carrara 7.1 working files that are included with this to get this object that we're going to be importing but it's really drop-down easy. You just go to File, Import, navigate to where the file is and in this case we're going to select Oil Rig and choose Open. Depending on the model format, maybe I should go back. Let me go back and cancel that. We'll come down to Import one more time. Take a look at all the different formats that you can import. As a matter of fact, they kind of go off the screen here. Let's see if I can bring that up a little bit so they're easier to see. It imports all the standard formats; 3D Studio, 3DMF, which is a very common one. Bio-Vision, which is actually motion files for creating animations; of course DAZ products. There's other basic formats like DXF, FilMBOX for different types of animation and just a whole list of them. I'm not going to go through them all. Enough said that Carrara does a ton of stuff. The most common ones out there to import are Wavefront obj files, LightWave files, which are .lwo files and the 3D Studio, which is 3ds files. Those would be kind of the interchange formats as well as some of the others that you see there. So I'm going to go ahead and bring down my open window again. We'll choose Oil Rig one more time and open it up. There is a problem when you import items into Carrara from any other 3D application and you're seeing evidence of that right here. We're importing a massive oil rig, the kind that sits out in the ocean and it's this teeny, tiny, little thing in the middle of the scene. Scale is not exact from 3D program to 3D program. There is no standard import format right now outside of Colada, which is starting to do that, where sizes mean the same thing to each program. So expect when you import items into Carrara that the scale may be wrong. In fact, some of the older Carrara content doesn't scale correctly to the scene. So to make this larger, here's a case where we need to touch on something we learned in the earlier sections, Section 2 specifically, on working with some objects and the best methods. Oil Rig is all contained in a single group. We saw how to make a group in our last object or last movie when we were working with Pancakes. The risk we've got is that it comes in completely disclosed. I can see all the separate elements that make up this oil rig and if I want to make the whole oil rig larger, I'll need to collapse all these so that Carrara thinks about it as a single object. I'll click once on that. It's selected now. I'll use the keyboard shortcut S for Scale instead of grabbing the Scale Tool over here. I'll click on one of the axis, hold down the Shift Key on my keyboard to make sure that it scales uniformly. And so I'll constrain it. We'll make this a little bit larger. We'll now use the walls to position this in 3D space. This is a case where we may want to come back to the Interactive Renderer just a little bit; that's the Up Arrow here, and then change one of the options right now. For the silhouettes, we have Box Only checked. What we may want to do is to go ahead and check All Walls and what that does is it actually projects the shape of the objects onto the walls instead of basic boxes. By choosing OK, now we can see when we look on the walls that we have a representation of the actual object so it's a little bit easier to see what's going on. I'll grab the Z axis, I'll drag this up in my scene a little bit so the floor is down here or I should say the legs here at the base of the floor of the assembly area. This is a great place where you could add an ocean primitive, just as we learned earlier on in this section on building scenes. We can drop it in and start working with it. Additionally, we can disclose all these areas now so we have crane, drill and you can see this object came in with colors but not with textures to make this look realistic. So many times things that you get on the web require additional work to get them to a level that you may want them at inside Carrara. But here's where you can use these imported objects just like you use any other Carrara objects. I'll come to the browser. Let me close this down so it's not taking up so much screen real estate. I can come to Metal over here and for this platform up here I can say well, gosh, I like that texture metal to go on there and I can drag over it with the object. I see it turn bright red and release it and now that texture is on this object so if I do a quick little render holding the keyboard shortcut X for a test render, we'll see it render out and we see that we've changed the color of the platform. You can go in and customize any type of model that you import with the toolsets that Carrara gives you. But that's how easy it is to import additional 3D content into your working Carrara 3D files.