Subtitles of the Movie

With this movie we begin the shortest Section in this series, and that happens to be a comparison of the Carrara 7 Modelers. There are three main Modelers that we're going to focus on in terms of being your heavy-lifting Modelers, the ones you do most of the work in and that's because you use these to create your general objects. Those are the Spline Modeler, the Vertex or sometimes known as the Polygon Modeler, and the Metaball Modeler. The reason I bring this up as the three main ones is that Carrara actually has quite a few modelers but they're highly specialized. There's one for Plants, and Terrains, and Clouds, and Hair, and others we're going to take a look at, but they're kind of one-trick ponies. You can only do one thing with them, however, these three Modelers Ð Spline, Vertex, and Metaball Ð can be used to create virtually anything you would want in your 3D environment including some of the things the specialized Modelers do. The specialized Modelers simply make it faster and easier to get that job done. So, let's go ahead and take a look at the first Modeler and a little bit about the terminology used for it and how and where you would want to use that. That's the Spline Modeler. It's called the Spline Modeler because the shapes in the Modeler are defined by lines that you draw on the wall and the floor of this modeling space. The reason they're referred to as Splines is because they're actually mathematical formulas as opposed to just pure lines that you would draw in a typical drawing program. That means that Carrara stores these mathematical formulas and they're very, very small as compared to other modeling methods. A human figure model usually comes in at something about between 15 and 30 megabytes, however you can have an entire complex scene built out of the Spline Modeler that may only be 200K. Additionally, there are some other little benefits to working with this Modeler. You can have variable resolution. You're not locked into one fidelity of resolution, and this also will help speed up or slow down render time. Or, if you take one of these Spline objects and convert it into a Vertex Model you can control how many polygons you'll have in it based on the fidelity. Something else that's really nice: non-destructive editing. You can fundamentally change the shape of the object or completely make a new shape and you never run out of modeling material. Some of the other Modelers; there are just limited things you have to work with and all you can do is push them around. The Spline Modeler lets you change volume, shape, size, angles, all sorts of things, and it's just super easy to work with. The next Modeler that we'll consider is the Vertex, or Polygon Modeler. The reason it gets its name Vertex Modeling is the little point that connects the lines together to create the 3D space. It's called a Vertex. However, the word Polygon comes from the shape that is made when all those lines are connected. There can be triangular polygons, polygons with four sides or more sides, sometimes called ingons, for indeterminate sides. Polygon Models, Vertex Models, are what the majority of model objects are made out of and it's because you can build anything with a Vertex Modeler from people to cars to planes to buildings Ð you can get it all done with a Vertex Modeler. There are some limitations to this, however, in terms of file size. The more detailed a Vertex Modeler the larger it gets. The Spline Modeler you wouldn't really want to make a human being out of but the Vertex Modeler, yeah, you sure would. You get extremely high levels of control with this Modeler, meaning you can just detail things down to the nth degree if you want, but you do get larger file sizes. The final of the three main Modelers happens to be the Metaball Modeler. This is a weird Modeler in Carrara and I say weird with all sorts of affection and kindness. It behaves differently. The Metaball, sometimes called Metablobs if you're coming from another 3D application, are basic geometric shapes Ð spheres, cubes Ð and when they come in close proximity to one another they kind of morph over and join, and create these blobs. That's very useful however when you're creating things with organic roundness like a teddy bear, or if you're creating any kind of liquids where you would have these nice rounded shapes all together on a floor, the Metaball Modeler is perfect for that and in fact, creating a similar effect like that in the Vertex or Spline Modeler would take a very long time. So, this Modeler, while I personally don't use it real regularly, when you need it, it's the only Modeler that can get the job done. Closing this Section we've got the three main Modelers we'll look at. In our next Section, Section 9, we'll start off with the Spline Modeler and look at where and how we use that.