Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to Section 3. In this one we will take a look at how to improve your experience with Carrara, both in terms of how to use the Camera Controls, but also how to use some of the Viewing Controls that are in Carrara simply to make how you interact with 3D Scene a little better. There are two menus to look at. One is the actual Preview Menu for the onscreen representation of your 3D files, and then the second menu's going to be covering very specifically the Camera Controls and how you move your cameras through the scene. They are different. Let's go ahead and hop into Carrara. Back in Carrara let's take a look at where those two menus occur. The first menu is at the top of the Assembly Room space, where I'm moving my mouse right now and you see little various things highlighting. That's how to change your view experienced in Carrara. The Camera Controls, how you actually move cameras around the scene, are over here on the left-hand side, and then we've got some additional Preview Controls that we'll cover shortly. There are three controls at the top that have nothing to do with your viewing experience and they seem a little bit out of place here so we won't cover those. Those happen to be the Lock Child Options, the Collision Detection, and the Constraints Options here. We'll cover those in later movies. There is one option to pay attention to and that is the Hide Unselected Objects. We only have a few objects in this scene but if I engage this they'll all disappear. However, if I go ahead and select on the Properties Panel either the Cube or the Sphere they all show up independently. This is a tremendous tool to use when you get very complex scenes or you've got a scene in a confined space like a room where the camera keeps going through objects while you try to work on it. The next one we'll take a look at is your Viewport Options and these are the little teeny mini-screens that change your view presentation of the Assembly Room. Now we have a Primary View selected, but if I click on the next one, we've got the Two Views Horizonal, and likewise going down the line we can change this to Three Views, finally Four, and then an Inset View. I do want to point out that there are two things to be aware of with these controls. You can access the Split View simply by pressing the numbers on your keyboard Ð 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 Ð for the different views as we go left to right, but a special feature, for example in the Split View right here, if I have a scene that is more vertical than horizontal this view's not going to help me out. You can change that by holding down the Shift key and then clicking again on this Preview icon right here it'll shift to a vertical format. Likewise, if we go to the Three Views, this may not be the best setup for my scene, so if I hold the Shift key and click one more time and again and again we'll see that this rotates through the scene, so you can customize it that way. These are the only two, the Split View and the Three View, are the only ones that this feature works on. The next set of three icons has to do with the little helper grids that we see over here. These grids are to help you locate things in space. Before I click over to those I want to call your attention to how to work with these different Viewports. Around this Camera 1 Viewport, the large one, is a yellow line that lets you know it's the active view. If I click off of any object in any one of these other Viewports you'll notice that the yellow line shifts to that Viewport, and I'll click down here. The reason that this is important is that the active Viewport is the one that is going to be respected when Use Check One View if you have multiple views open. So, if I click One View now we're going to zoom in on the Camera Top View right now. I'll go back to our Three View. If I wanted this main window to be the one then I'll simply need to click in this area and then click on the Single View. Let's take a look at the Grid Walls. Sometimes these are visually problematic if you're looking at a landscape scene or your camera is right next to one, it fills up your whole screen. You can simply turn these on and off by clicking on them. Then we've got a Preview Ð I'm skipping a little one here, our Interactive Renderer Setting Ð we've got some Preview boxes here that show you different ways to represent your geometry. We have the Bounding Box Mode, which is where just basic boxes surround the objects. We've got the Wireframe Mode, our basic Flat Shaded, our Light Shaded, and then our Texture Shaded. Something we're not seeing, however, right here is the fact that there's actually a texture-defined pattern on this. If I come over here and grab my little Spot, or Test Area Render Tool, I'll click on that and then I can click and drag across my scene, we'll notice that we actually have a spotlight illuminating something that looks like a crumpled up aluminum foil. We can't see this in this higher resolution Preview. Knowing that, let's come back here to our Interactive Render settings. Very important area to become familiar with for the simple reason that you can change the fidelity of how things are previewed for you, especially when you're working with Texture Maps. The most significant difference here that does present different options down below is right here at the very top. Currently, I have Software Render enabled, but there's also the option for OpenGL. OpenGL gives you the highest resolution available when you're working on your scene, but it also demands a fairly advanced graphics card to do that, so when you're working with complex textures or anything like that, this will show it off for you. I'll engage that now for you so you can see it. We have a couple other options that show up. We can change the Resolution of the Texture Maps as they're presented. I'll leave this at 256 for the moment for the lower, just Gouraud Shading, but if we come over here to the higher resolution, Textured version, this is where the OpenGL will pay off. Something else I want to call your attention to is that we've got different display options for Levels of Transparency for objects, but a really cool one happens to be the Silhouette option. We'll click on this, and this is for both Software and OpenGL. I'll accept these parameters right now. What the Silhouette option does Ð and let me come back up here and select my Move Tool Ð is that it shows the shape of the object on the Grid Walls on the side. Extremely useful feature, so if I select this Sphere it shows up as a circle to help you locate this in space, a really nice way. And if we're working with multiple views where we've got side views or something going on I'll come to our Quad View, being able to see the circles or shapes of other objects on the wall becomes a large benefit. Finally, if we want to change, say, this Front Camera View to something else it's as easy as coming up to the word of the Camera right here, Front View in this case, clicking on it. We have an option to choose any other camera or to save positions if we have a Camera1, or the Director's Camera saved. So this is how we start working with our Preview capabilities. In the next movie we'll take a look at the Camera Controls.