Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie we'll take a look at some general 3D best methods. It applies to Carrara, it applies to any other 3D program you work, or work with. It's probably good for most work when you get into complex issues like this. This is the Stock House in the previous movie that I dragged into our scene from the Content Browser, a real easy operation. I'm using this because it highlights very specifically one of the preeminent things you need to do in 3D and that is to be very organized. In your own little private 3D world you're responsible for everything. All objects, all lights, all scene functions, and it's very tempting sometimes to simply want to make stuff look cool and not spend a little time organizing it, and that comes back to make your life very hard later on. Let me show you what's been done well in this Carrara model that comes stock found in the Browser Palette, which is Command-B on the Macintosh or Control-B on the PC, that aren't set up quite as efficiently as this one is, so I'm using this one because it's a great example. I'm going to go ahead and close that Browser window. The House is a group, and I know it's a group because it's got this little disclosure triangle as evidenced over here on the right-side in the Properties Palette under the Instances tab. Clicking on this disclosure triangle will show me all the separate little subsets that make up this group. These have been labeled as Walls, if we disclose Walls then we have these things called Free Form. Now these aren't super descriptive, but as you click on them in the Instances tab you'll notice that they highlight over I your scene so that you can see real specifically what part of the object it is you're talking about. If you want to change something, for example, this one. We want to say, well Freeform, that's not real descriptive. I want to make it even easier. With that object selected either in the Window or over here in the Properties Palette you can come up to the name and simply change the name to something like Left Wall and click Return or Enter. Notice that as you click Return to validate the entry it still remains highlighted. If you actually want to get out of here you need to click on something else or press the Tab key. There are several times that you'll probably see during this series, and all the users seem to do it, they'll enter something hit the Return key and then go do a keyboard shortcut and go why is my camera not moving, or why am I not doing my little render using the keyboard shortcut X? What's happening is that it's filling this entry area up here with that information. Just so you know. I'm sure it'll happen once in a while to me. Additionally, with the wall selected here we do have the option to look at the shader involved, and clicking on this disclosure triangle here I get a list of all shaders in the scene. Now, here's a case of where this wasn't done particularly well, and this is how you can improve when you're working with stock or in your own work. You know what, the term Shader 28, which is what is used on that wall, means absolutely nothing to me. This is where you'd want to go ahead and come over here and giving it a meaningful name, we've got Shader 28, you can highlight Shader 28. It gives you a nice list of everywhere that its used. It's used on the left wall, and it's used on all the Freeforms. Well, why don't we name this instead, something more meaningful like WallColors. That lets you know right away that when we come back to our Instances tab and we happen to select any one of these we can see the Shader that says: Wall Colors. It's a nice way to re-enforce how you're working with your objects. Let me go ahead and close this down just a little bit so that we can see some of our other options. All compact the walls again. Same thing with floor. We get these names that mean nothing. Shader 29, and the reason they're named this is that when you go in your Shaders or Texture Room Ð and with it highlighted. you can come over to the Edit Menu and you can come down to New Master Shader, and the default name when you create new shaders is always Shader X. It'll start with Shader and whatever's next in line in terms of numbers is what's assigned to it. So as this model was being built by the original author, they just kept adding new Shaders, or as they created a new object actually, it will create a new Shader name that starts with Shader and then appends it with a number. Change those. Not a good idea. This, when you're working on a single house, well, it's not particularly a big deal, but if you wind up creating a village and have multiple houses it's very easy to see how quickly you could get lost with the quantity of objects, or when you look at your Shaders over here, the shaders mean nothing, so if we've got a wooden cabin, a townhouse, an apartment building, having the shader names reflect that really, really important. So, name everything. Shaders, Objects, and instances of them. You may be wondering well, gosh, how do I group things together? When you've got different objects in a scene Ð let me move our entire house back Ð and this is something else that I want to show you right now, working with Best Methods, don't leave your objects open or fully disclosed because it'll come back to bite you later on, and here's what I mean. When the object is fully disclosed like this, when I click on something I'm actually only clicking on the subset group, not the whole house, so if I clicked, say, right up here on the roof, I'm getting roof, so that's fine, but I can drag it real easily and tear apart my building. Do Command-Z or Control-Z to undo that. I suggest leaving all groups compacted until you need to get inside of them and then you can go ahead and move the group that way. Something nice with groups is that if you want to go work on it, if we've got an entire village of multiple buildings going on Ð I'm going to create a duplicate here real quick Ð we can simply drag that off to the side, a little bit further. To work on something that's already a group you can actually double-click on it and it takes you into its own little special room where you can work on it without seeing everything else. There's a cool little feature Ð I'll choose Jump Out now to get back to our main scene. Right here in the top little area we've got Hide Unselected Objects, which is another nice way to visually clean up your scene while you're working. It's nice to see everything in your scene, but it takes more computer resources and it also can be quite confusing if you have lots of objects or trees in your scene. So, there are some Best Methods: name everything, group things together Ð we'll go over that as we start building our scenes out Ð and take a look at only what you need to see when you're on your screen. In our next movie we'll take a look at some very important features of the Carrara Preferences.