Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we'll take a quick look at the Carrara Content Browser and Manager and how easy it is to use this. It's down at the bottom of the screen and the way to open it is either you can drag this thing up here and click over to Content Browser. If I just click once that will close down. You can also come up to Windows, come down to Browser, and it'll automatically snap open to that so you don't need to open the tabs. This is a great way to look at the stock content that comes with Carrara and you can also create your own custom files and folders with models that you make, or models that you may import if you get them from another source. There are many things that are in the Content Browser. We've got some default scenes that you can use from Space to Indoor, to Landscapes, that are already Preset by the Carrara package, so this is a great way to learn more about the program simply by opening some of these files and taking a look at how they've been put together. Objects which are singular, and sometimes highly complex objects, that you can simply drag into your scene. This in fact is where I got the house for the preceding movie. When you see an object you like, there are two things you can do. One is to double-click on the object which will actually open the real object as a Carrara file so you can go in and make some modifications, but if you only want to use it in your scene then it's easy as click and drag and drop, and it goes right into your scene. Super fast, super easy. The other categories we have here are Shaders. These are where there are some preexisting Carrara Shaders for a wide variety of applications. Again, you can create your own files. I'll show you how to do that in a second. Clips, which we haven't made yet, but this is where you store some preexisting or content that you create animation clips to reuse in other animations. A broad-based miscellaneous category where things are stored here, like special camera effects, lighting effects. You can track down and reuse items. For example, for lights, if this was a spotlight and I wanted it to have a special effect, I simply grab the effect and drag it to the light Ð super easy to use. Artwork is used by some people real extensively. I don't use this a whole lot. It is where you may have common files that you want to use as background or reference images to take a look at, as you build out other scenes that may relate to each other, so it's a nice time saver that way. And finally, Content. This is going to be used by folks that have a lot of DAZ or Poser content. It's a great way to manage the wealth of preexisting material that's out there for you. For example, you can have multiple runtimes. If you're new to Poser and Carrara, this is a structure that was set up a long time ago by the Poser folks of how items are categorized and quantified when you use them, so without going into a whole lot of detail on that, this is where you store all your stuff. So, I've got Poser 7, this is where I find special faces Ð let me just close some of those so we can see them Ð so we see faces for individual characters. You can drag them onto the characters. This is where we also have our Ð well, let me close Faces Ð this is where you find figures. We've got robots here Ð all sorts of things. Just drag them and drop them into the scene, it's super easy to do. We do have some little display options over here, one is Small Previews; when you click on that, so if you've got a lot of content and it's very easy to see how you can get a lot of content in here. Sometimes having the smaller displays is very useful. If you want to make them larger so you can get a better idea of what's going on that's great. You other little option over here is Name Only, so if you're very familiar with what stuff looks like and just want to categorize by name that's how you do it. An important feature over here is the File Folder Menu. You can see it's got a little triangle next to it, which means there's additional information if you click on this. So if we click and hold with the mouse we get some options here for our folders where we can actually add additional runtimes for content, and that's where we are now, under the Content tab. We can auto-detect runtimes. Carrara will go out and take a look. You know it does a pretty good job, but I found personally that occasionally it will miss one of the runtimes. You saw that I had some extra ones in there and I have to find them manually, but that's OK because you can open them manually by simply going to Add Folder. It's not highlighted right now because I'm not in that section to make that work. You can update a folder, so if I've dropped content into a folder and want Carrara to refresh it, we can do that. So there are other options down here for that. If I come down to Objects Ð I want to get back to a display here where we've got a gazebo or something, but I wanted to add another file folder down at the bottom Ð really easy to do. I've done this. There are a series of autos that I've created, worked with, and made very Carrara-friendly. If I click on that we've got some here for that, but the way you do that is by simply coming over to Add Folder, and then you drive to where you need to go in your computer system to add that folder and it shows everything in there. So that's a quick tour of the Browser Palette. You'll be using it quite extensively, I'm sure, as you work on your modeling scenes. In our next movie, let's take a look at some general 3D Best Methods as we get into this, because you'll see me using some of the features of Carrara that also will save you a lot of stress as you start working with this program.