Subtitles of the Movie

With this movie we begin taking a look at Carrara's setup and just how the interface works, and how you start navigating around the program. So, we'll take a look at the interface, but we'll also have a Room tour, and the reason I bring that up is because Carrara, like many other 3D applications, has different environments in which you work to carry out certain regular 3D tasks. The interface for each one of these areas, or rooms, changes from one room to the next, although there is consistency between them, or predictability at least. The one consistent thing that is always in each one of the rooms is at the very top right-hand of the working box, or program interface, are five icons: a hand, a wrench, a pencil, a paintbrush, and a filmstrip. This is the way Carrara lets you know that you can always click on these to navigate between the Assembly Room, which is the hand where you put things together; the wrench is for the Modeling Room, or Modeling Rooms where you go ahead and tweak and make individual objects; the pencil is for a Storyboard Room, which is how you can go ahead and visually see your animation over time if you're making an animation; the brush is for texturing and shading in objects; and lastly we've got a filmstrip, when you're actually rendering your file out whether it happens to be a still image or an actual animation in it. Let's go ahead and hop into the actual Assembly Room interface and take the tour there. When you launch Carrara one of the first things that you're presented with is a blank screen. The first thing you need to do is to go ahead and create a document and, like most programs, you come to the File pull-down menu and choose New, although you can use the keyboard shortcut, Command-N on the Macintosh, or Control-N on the PC. This is, by default, a new document wizard that pops up and I actually leave mine on all the time. I use these scenes quite frequently specifically because you can also set the size of your scene. I'll cover this in more detail in movies coming up later. Should you not want this document or the dialog, you can always choose to skip it and reset it back in the Preferences if you'd like to turn that on at some point. Let's go ahead and create an empty scene, and here's the first thing you see when you launch a new scene. They'll come in by default with a distance light, and we'll cover that, but let's take a look at how the controls are set up. In the very top, as I indicated at the beginning of this movie, is your access to all the different Rooms that you have when you work inside Carrara. The Assembly Room is probably where you'll spend most of your time. This is where you assemble all your models and various models. Carrara has different modelers to create plants, to create polygon objects, to create spline objects, and this is where you bring them all together. Next to that we've got the access to the Modeling Room, and we'll cover that when we get into that, but let's take a look right now specifically at the Assembly Room. On the left-hand side of the screen where the cursor is moving right now, are your Controls always to go ahead and change and move things in your scenes that have anything like this. The Controls are there, slightly different sometimes if you're in the Modeling Room, but they're consistently present there. Your Camera Controls are consistently present below that on the left-side as well. Underneath that is an Area Render shortcut, keyboard shortcut X when we get to that. There's also Camera Controls for panning your scene; there are also keyboard shortcuts for that that we'll take a look at, and of course, zoom in and out. If you happen to have a mouse wheel on your mouse you can use it and scroll back and forth to go ahead and zoom into a scene; and that's a great way to take those types of shortcuts. In the upper left-hand corner of this underneath textual areas, we've got four little funky icons and their presence here is new in Carrara 7. There is the Simulate Physics icon, which is when you're creating natural motion, having Carrara figure out how things should behave, you engage that. This became new in Carrara 6. We have our Finish Editing Tool, our Edit Vertex Object Tool, and these two are unique now because you can work on polygon models, or vertex models inside the Assembly Room. You access that by selecting the object and then clicking on one of these tools. The other one that looks like a paintbrush right here is how to launch the 3DPaint aspect of Carrara. The 3D Painting is not found, as you would think it would be, in the Texture area. It's kind of its own separate little program that runs inside Carrara. You can access the results of that through the Texture Room, but to do the 3D Painting you always have to launch this interface, the 3DPaint interface, with this paintbrush. This first row of icons across the top represent all the things you can make in Carrara, all the way from basic primitive objects to more advanced objects. The first row that we have here to choose from is all the primitive objects Ð Spheres, Cubes, and so forth. Grids as well. Next to that we've got an icon here for Spline objects, and the reason it's showing a wine glass is because the Spline Room works very mathematically. Instead of keeping track of little points and little polygons in space it only keeps track of very elegant mathematical formulas. Why should you even care about that? It's because that format allows you to create some fairly detailed types of geometry when you model that is completely resolution independent. It's very editable. You can go in and create kinds of objects and shapes very quickly that you can do in no other modeler than Carrara. Next to that is the Vertex or Polygon Modeler. This will activate the Modeling Room for those, just like the Spline, clicking on this, will activate the Modeling Room for the Spline object. There's a Metaball Modeler, a Formula Modeler, a Text Modeler. Then we've got Particle Emitters, we have got Terrain Builders, Plant Builders, Cloud Builders, Fire, and as you go through the list we've got more for Hair, Ocean, Primitives; we've got Lights, Cameras, and some different effects that we apply to a scene later on. This is how you create, or find, everything you want to make things in Carrara. In our next movie we'll go ahead and continue this tour and take a look real quickly at the other elements in our interface.