Subtitles of the Movie

With this quick Room tour we're going to take a look at Carrara's Texture Room. A very easy room to use, but it also has the potential to be one of the most complex Rooms you get involved with. Let me tell you how we get to it and then different methods to get to it based on what is in your scene. The Texture Room can be accessed straight across by just simply clicking on this little Brush icon up here that says Texture. However, with nothing selected and no texture being made there's nothing in there when you go there, so I'm going to come back to our Assembly Room by clicking on the Hand, and I'm going to put an object into our scene real quickly so we can put a texture on it. Let's select Sphere. I'll click in the middle of the Room, and this is just a primitive object; we'll get into scene-building in much more detail later on as well as modeling different objects. And we've got a basic sphere and, you know what, actually I'm going to delete this. Let's add a Cube instead. The reason I'm doing this is that the Previews in the Shader Room are spheres just like we see over here on the Properties Palette. But I want to demonstrate that what you have selected in your Room will also show up in the Properties, or the Texture Room itself. We can, with an object selected, get to the Texture Room now by clicking on the little Brush icon, but also we can come over here to the Properties Palette and choose Edit. This will allow us to edit the specific texture that is on this object, so I'll choose that now. We pop into our Texture Room and there's our cube in stunning gray. We have access to all the components that make up the Shader Tree and we'll come back to this in just a second and look at that with something besides gray on here, but we can quickly simply change the color of our cube and there it is, it's blue now. There is a feature that I want to point out, or several features actually in the Texture Room. One is we've got a full screen presentation of our texture area and you may or may not have yours showing like this, let me show you how to swap between these two. The easiest way to do that is to double-click on this Header Bar where it says the Shader, and you can name the Shaders right now, it simply says Shader of Document 2, but if I double-click on this, it turns into its own window. The reason you might want to do this is if you're copying components from one Shader to another, you can have both windows open and simply drag them across, and again, we'll get into more detail about how to do this later on when we get to our actual texturing series. I'm going to double-click on this Header Bar again. It expands. I'm going to come back to our Assembly Room real quickly and I want to show you another feature of the Texture capabilities and that happens to be Presets. I'll click on that, and we're taken to some Presets that are actually in your Browser tab, too that we'll demonstrate or take a look at later on, but this is one way to get to those. Let's choose something really fun like the Alien Mushroom texture. I'll select that and choose OK, and that is automatically applied to our cube, but you'll notice the cube looks like it's solid red even though our little spherical preview shows this red and green mix going on. That's because we've got a shaded preview showing up here, or selected in the top. In our next section on using the cameras and enhanced viewing we cover all these little items up here, but just know that if we go from Gouraud to Textured we'll be able to get a better preview of that. Let's hop back into the Texture Room now by selecting Edit, or we can come up to the Brush, I'll choose the Brush this time with the object selected, we'll pop back into our Room and we get a dynamic update of our object. You'll notice it took just a little bit longer to show here in the window and that's because it's doing some math to blend these two together, and let me show you what I mean. Every one of these branches of the Shader Tree is called, well, it's a Branch of the Shader Tree, so the Color Branch, if I select that, will show that we've got a red and green shader that's being blended by a special blender that's called Noise, or has spots with it. You can change the size of the spots and do some little things, and you'll notice that each time I make a change our Preview window updates dynamically. You have an option down here in the bottom of the Preview window to turn off Auto Update. Normally it's smart to leave it on, but when you get to some of the advanced functions in this Shader, Subsurface Scattering, which is like a glass of milk or marble that absorbs light and kind of glows just a little bit, you can tell that it's absorbing light, it's not, you know, super solid, or impenetrable to light, that takes a lot longer for Carrara to calculate and sometimes a lot longer to do, so it's worth it to turn it off. If you don't like the checkered floor you can also turn that off, and if Auto Update is off you can make changes and then click Render so you can get a preview before you hop back into your scene. But something else that's good to know is that you can move this around, so if you've got a very complex or specialized texture you can go ahead and come over here to the Camera Dolly Control, and this is all covered in the next section as well, but if I select the Dolly Tool and move it you'll notice that the cube itself moves and updates a little bit, so you can rotate around your object in your scene and view it from different vantage points. As always, you've got your object Preview over here in the Properties Palette, and just like in the Assembly Room you can change how this is presented in here by the Gouraud or the Texture View. And that's your basic introduction into the Texture Room. In our next movie we'll take a room tour of the Render Room.