Subtitles of the Movie

Let's go ahead and take a look at a couple other features in this movie that are part of the Assembly Room but have some commonality across all the Rooms. One is the Properties Tray. This is the element over here on the right-hand side. The contents of this Tray change depending on what Room you're in and what you have selected in your scene. For example, if I roll over the directional light here and click on it, suddenly this Properties Tray is populated with the properties that we can adjust and change and work with for this given object. So here we find the name of the object, any special items in the case of a light that you want to illuminate or not. We also adjust things like how strong the light is, whether it casts shadows Ð those types of things. Additionally, in the lower part of the Properties Tray here, in the Assembly Room we've got what's called the Scene Instance View. This shows you the content of everything that's in your scene. In here you can make groups, you can make subsets, and manage the content of your scene as you start adding more and more things to it. In the upper portion here we've got the Generals tab, we have Motion here which is how we adjust scaling, items like that. Modifiers are special things that you apply to objects to change how they interact with the scene, and then effects that are unique to those objects at hand. In the bottom we've got tabbed areas for our Scene Controls here, we can look at all the objects in the scene Ð well, we don't have any yet. I'm going to go ahead and just drop in a sphere primitive here so we can populate that. We can see that we've got a scene in here, and don't worry about the pointing and clicking now if you're new to Carrara. We will come back and talk very specifically about how to start scene-building shortly. We also have a Shader List of all the shaders, or textures that are in our scene, and for those people working with sound we also have Sound Control panels and then we've got a special area for Clips which is where we use our non-linear animation clips and we can drag those into our scene. Down in the lower portion of the window we've got two items down here with their own separate tabs. One is called the Sequencer, which is your Timeline if you're coming from any video-editing applications, or other 3D programs. This is where you go ahead and do all your keyframing and control anything over time that needs to have control applied to it. You can also set your frames per second, and important little feature right here is the ability to turn on and off, playing every frame on Playback when you play animations. The other tab that's down here is the Browser tab. This is a tab where you can go ahead and grab pre-made scenes, pre-made objects, and simply add them to your scene real easily. We have Scenes, we have Objects, Shaders, Special Clips, Miscellaneous is anything you want, an Artworks tab, and a Content tab. We'll come back and visit all these in greater detail, but for instance, if we wanted to let's just say add something to our scene like an airplane, the Browser's where you find that and you simply drag them into your scene and place them, and that is absolutely huge, but that's our airplane. I'll scroll out using the scroll wheel and you can see that's been added to our scene. So on the bottom we have our Browser Tray. You can get to these all from the Windows pull-down here. The Assembly Room and all the other Rooms have their keyboard shortcuts. We have our Maximize Window View, then we also have the Browser Tray which has a keyboard shortcut Command-B, since I'm on a Macintosh, Control-B for PC. The Properties has its own keyboard shortcut command, I, and as you become more familiar and start flipping around your scene these are tremendous time-savers. Also the Sequencer, while it is technically open it's hiding behind the Browser, so to bring that to the forefront you would have to engage the Sequencer right here, and there it pops to the foreground. So those are the essential elements of the Assembly Room. These sliding panels are present in almost all the Rooms. The Modeling Rooms are a couple exceptions where we don't have that. Another little item is the ability to hide the program up here, to go to full screen mode or not full screen mode. I'm currently not running in full screen mode myself to accommodate a smaller area. And then, of course, to just kill the program, close the application is the little X. All the others are pretty self-explanatory up here. The Text pull-down menus, and we'll get to those in greater detail as we get through our movies. In our next movie we'll take a tour of some of the Mini-Modeling Rooms and capabilities that Carrara 7 Pro has.