Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we'll take a quick look at Carrara's Storyboard Room. We'll be spending more detail on each one of these little sections as we get into its use later on in the series. The Storyboard Room is something that I personally do not use a whole lot, but I'm aware of some users that absolutely adore this feature of Carrara. So, know that this tool is here and maybe it will work for you, maybe you'd like to work a different method, but we'll show you what it involves. This Storyboard Room, and you get to it by clicking on the little storyboard icon up here that looks like a pencil, the reason for that is in the olden days with animation they used to actually sketch out every frame or lots of frames for storyboards. If you have any exposure to animation you're probably familiar with that, and it's still done today, but a lot of it is also done digitally as well. This gives us the ability to see an animation in step-by-step representation. Here is why I haven't done anything yet. When I click on the Storyboard icon it will automatically transform my Carrara file into an animation project. That can be problematic sometimes if you're unaware of that feature and it's very important because there are times that you're working on a still image and you don't want an animation, and if you click on the Storyboard icon it's a one-way trip for your file. Automatically converts it into an animation format, which in and of itself is not a bad thing, it's just that suddenly you have some time features engaged in your project you may not be aware of, or that you can have some issues with when you're creating a file. I'm going to go ahead and click on the Storyboard icon right now. We'll see that it pops open a file and we get a little filmstrip here, where everything happens to look the same. It shows us down at the bottom what camera we're looking through, the frame rates per second, the display, whether we want it uniform or selection, and so those options are all changed, or new I should say, to this interface. Across the top all the features are the same and to the left all the features are the same, so there's no change there, and in our Properties Palette everything looks the same as well. That's OK. Let's go back to our Assembly Room where you'll be able to see a little more accurately what the Storyboard Room does here. Again, what I'm doing here, don't worry if I'm going a little bit too fast, we'll cover how to create objects, insert objects into a scene and create an animation in much more detail later on. I'm simply going to insert a sphere in my scene by clicking on this little tab up here, clicking actually off to the side in this scene over here. I'm going to click on the little disclosure arrow, scroll down to Cube and insert a cube. I'm going to raise up my Timeline Indicator right here, and we're starting at zero seconds. I'm going to move my Timeline Indicator to 2, I'm going to grab my sphere and move it here, and then we'll move our Timeline Indicator all the way to the end of our little 4-second mini animation, and we're done here. Now when we scrub the Timeline, either by grabbing the handle right here, we see that we've got a little motion going on, that's fine. Well, now let's take a trip back to the Storyboard Room and see exactly how that integrates now. I'm going to go ahead and close this down. We still have access to our Timeline Control down here so we can move anywhere in the scene, and notice as I do that that frame by frame there's a little yellow highlight that goes around that is to show you what point in time you are in your animation. You can click on any frame and activate it and fine-tune your animation from the Storyboard Room. For example, at this point here at two seconds and 1 frame, if I wanted the sphere to actually be slightly different in space I could click and drag it around interactively and see how it updates across the animation Timeline. Very cool feature to finesse some of the animation that you may be doing. There are also some other advanced features that we'll get into specifically when we look at animation, but this is a great way to see interactively how your animation's working. In our next movie let's go ahead and take a quick tour of the Texture Room.