Subtitles of the Movie

Continuing with our discussion of interactive transforms, let's look at the scaling transform. Start by looking at the scaling gizmo. The scaling gizmo has shafts, two shafts in Orthographic view ports, three shafts in perspective view ports. It has a bar connecting the shafts and a triangle connecting the shafts. To scale equally in all three dimensions click and drag on the triangle. To scale in just one dimension, click and drag on a shaft. And to scale in two dimensions, click and drag on the bar which is called the plane handle, and it doesn't necessary scale equally in the two directions, that depends on how you move the cursor. So you notice that even though this called the uniform scale tool, it also does non uniform scaling, scaling by different amounts in different directions. And it's good to be aware of that, for one thing so that you don't do it accidentally. But also non uniform scaling and even uniform scaling can sometimes cause unexpected results when it interacts with modifiers. So it can be tricky to use non uniform scaling successfully. If you are having a problem with non uniform scaling or even uniform scaling, if you are working with a primitive like a box or a sphere, any of these primitive objects, let's take cylinder we happen to have lying around over here, you can always go to the modifier panel and change the parameters, change the radius or the height in this case for example. And that will change the dimensions and you can animate that change as well and we will see that in the coming chapter. This only works with primitive objects, with other kind of objects for example, this is an editable mesh. We'll be studying those in the coming chapters. You don't have dimensions of those any more so another option there is the transform or X form modifier, and that can be another way to avoid problems associated with the scaling tool. And we will be looking at the transform modifier and editable meshes in coming chapters. I will just get rid of that. There is also a scaling fly out from which you can select uniform scaling, non uniform scaling, and squash. The non uniform scaling is only useful for numerically applied transforms. When you are scaling interactively, the uniform scaling and the non uniform scaling are exactly the same. But the squash is interesting. Squash is a specialized form of non uniform scaling, which scales the axis in opposite directions, in order to keep the object’s volume constant. For example, if I expand the X axis here, both the Y and the Z axis get smaller. If you look down to the lower right there in the perspective window you can really see that. As the X gets drawn out both the Y and Z get drawn in, as the X comes back, the Y and the Z go out again. So that the volume of the object remains exactly the same and you get a squash and stretch effect. It's often used in cartoons. So that concludes our discussion of scaling and it also concludes our discussion of interactive transforms. And by the way, I would like to mention that the fish used in this chapter and the last, is a model created in Poser 5, a 3D character design and animation tool from Curious Labs. in this chapter and the last, is a model created in Poser 5, a 3D character design and animation tool from Curious Labs.