Subtitles of the Movie

With this movie we start finally getting into some fun stuff here working with Carrara. We are looking at Advanced Scene Management in this movie and I'll show you some of the benefits to doing that. I've created a basic city scene here that is super easy to do because the city's already been built. If you purchased Carrara, then you have in browser down here in the City Section of your Objects a feature called City Block. It includes street intersections and multiple buildings and a typical kind of mid-western USA type of town. Now we're going to take a look at how Advanced Scene Management pays off and the types of things you can do with it. If you have access to the working files you can open file 0506 AdvancedSceneManagement.car and take a look at exactly what I'm talking about. The scene you will open up is the scene before we go through and affect some of the changes in this particular movie. There's a couple little tips and tricks. Our next section we'll start getting into lighting a scene, which is one of the most critical sections of using Carrara because it can make or break your scene. I've pulled off a little trick in here that you'll want to take a look at called the Sky Array and it's a way to create believable light in your scene that renders very, very, fast. Carrara has multiple features in it to make believable types of lighting environments. Sky Array is one way to do that and save yourself some render time. Let's go to our quad view by coming up here to the time of the Assembly Room and clicking on the Four Views Tab. The Light Array is right in the center. It looks like a jumble of distance lights and I'll back out using my mouse scroll wheel. I have a sunlight object in here. It has to do with the realistic sky settings that we'll get into in more detail later on. We have a side view and a front view. I'm going to change this front view to Director's Camera by clicking on the camera name in the upper left-hand corner of the little window and choosing Director's Camera. You can see my rendering camera down here and I've already rendered a scene out. If we go to the Render Room over here by clicking on the little movie icon, we can see what renders out with this scene. You get a nice sky setting. We have some nice blue coming in here, which would be illumination from the sky and then the sunlight. Here's where Advanced Scene care and management really pays off. We'll come back to the Assembly Room. The Sky Array is a collection of multiple distance lights that have all been turned certain directions and had their shadows turned Off. So if I select one Array item, we see that the brightness is 23 percent. That's the same because I just duplicated and rotated those lights so they're all the same at the current point in time. We'll come back to the Render Room and we'll see that, you know, this is really dark in the shadow area. On a bright, sunny day even the shadow side of buildings gets more light than this. Well, here's where Advanced Management pays off. We'll go back to our scene and because they're all grouped together, I can simply click and drag around all those lights and have access and change all their lighting values simultaneously. So if I bring this up instead to something like 47 percent, if we do a render in our scene now or even actually we'll just do a little area render by choosing our Area Render Tool, keyboard shortcut X. We'll see that the light on the sides of the building is much brighter now. More like realistic lighting; maybe a little bit too blue and that's OK because all we have to do is click on this and take this more into a neutral type of blue or a gray-blue area that we would expect for shadow areas. I'll close that, we'll do a quick little area render just right on this building here. Well, that was easy. Now we've got some nice indirect light. Other ways to choose Advanced Scene Management, I'll collapse the Sky Arrays and City Blocks. I've pulled this out of the stock objects that you get because it was put together very well and can show you some real specific things you want to have going on. If you wind up rendering a scene that will have more cameras for an animation or something, let me highlight the City Block object and rotate that around the scene. Sometimes there can be a ton of stuff that gets in your way of setting up a scene real well. Well, let's zoom into this a little bit. If I wanted to get down and get an idea of where objects were in this scene, if this Director's Camera was actually a different rendering camera, this block is right in the way right here. How do I hide that? Well, the nice thing is you can just close this, select Block 4 and come up under the Generals Tab to Visible and either hide the entire block or I can hide it in the 3D View. Now, with this hidden, I can go ahead and see what's going on in the scene. But if I do an area render, you'll notice that the building's still there, it's still showing up. That's because I only disabled the Show Object in 3D View. If I wanted everything to go away completely for a render, then I would simply hide the entire object by choosing or disabling the visibility. Come down and render and now that happens to be gone in the scene. The advantage to working with very tightly controlled objects in groups like this is that as you expand and disclose them, you can hide and reveal different areas of your objects really easily and this becomes real important for some of the more advanced tricks we'll be pulling off later on in the series where we're working with animation and having things move from one area to another. Sometimes you actually have duplicate objects that you switch at the last second by using Visibility Controls. So this is a very fast, easy way to control and work with your scene real specifically by grouping your objects and moving them around, rotating, enabling visibility, all those types of things that make your life as a 3D modeler and renderer that much easier. In our next section we'll go ahead and jump into the all important how you light scenes in Carrara.