Subtitles of the Movie

Now that we've had a chance to see how 3D space is laid out in Electric Image, let's take a closer look at our four world views, Quad view, by looking at the options available to us in each one of these Windows. Now, you notice that the little tools here are the same for the Top, Front, and Side Views. The Camera View, which is where we're getting our perspective view of world space, has slightly different Icons, or tools, down here. Let's just pick one of these orthographic views. Let's pick the Top View and click the first button, which is the Min-Max button, to maximize our Window view. Right off we can tell which view we're looking at by the Title bar of that particular Window. So, as you can see we're looking at the Top View of this project. The orientation of the view is also indicated by this little button down here. With the cursor hovering over that button it tells us what the tool is. This is the Projection view, or simply the orientation of the view that we're looking at. It shows us these two axes here, the Z and the X, and as we've seen in the previous lesson, that is Depth and Width. We don't see the Y-axis listed here because we're looking from the Top View and there's no way to see wide projection from this view. If you click on this you can change the view from Top to one of the other orthographic views, and back. Next, we'll look at this button that looks like a miniature filmstrip, and that's the Preview button. If you have any animation in your scene, a click of this button will play it back in that Viewport. Notice that once you've clicked Preview, time controls appear showing what frame you're on, play the animation from the start or jump to the end; play the animation backward or forward, or pause the animation. If you want to get out of Preview Mode, just click anywhere and you're back into your regular World View Mode. The next button at the bottom of our World View is this little blue Sphere Icon. That's Shade Mode. This lets us pick how our 3D scene is displayed. Let's add a Sphere to our scene and click on the Shade Mode button. There are several different methods, ranging from just the points or vertices of our objects, to Wireframe, all the way down here to fully Phong Shaded. Each Mode allows you to see different information about your object. For instance, Wireframe, if we go back and pick that, will give you a very good idea about how dense or complex your models are; also, the more complex the shading, the slower your Preview Playback may be, so you may want to pick a simpler Mode for playback within Animator. Let's get back to our previous scene and let's skip down to Display Elements in our Shade Mode. Display Elements lets you decide what kind of objects are displayed in your World Views. Right now I have Cameras and Lights unchecked. Let's turn those on. Now we see in our World View that we have one camera and some lights. They were there all the time, it's just that they weren't displayed until I told the Animator to do so. The next button we want to look at in our World View is this little camera Icon, and if you hover over that it says Snapshot. If you click and hold on that button we can select Window or Full Size, and let's pick Full Size. That immediately launches Electric Image Camera and renders our scene from that World View, so we have a fully rendered, very quickly rendered, version of our World View. Let's go ahead and close that. And now, let's shrink down our Top View back to its normal size, and select Window Size. And, of course, with the Window set to a smaller size and you select Window Size from the Snapshot little menu, you get a much smaller size image rendered. Maximize our view one more time. The next button down here allows us to resize the Window to any dimensions that we would like. Let's try 500 by 400, and it gives us a very specific Window size for that World View. Click Maximize again, and again on the bottom here we have our 3D spatial coordinates that show us the coordinates for the current position of our cursor. Because we're on Top View we do not see Height, which is Y, but we do see X and Z, which is Width and Depth. On the far right side of the Window is a Magnifying Glass and if you click and drag on that, then the World View will zoom up and down interactively. And, of course, you can manually resize the Window at any time by dragging this Grow button at the bottom right corner. At the top left corner is the Close Window button. If you click on that the Window disappears. If you accidentally do that, you can simply bring it back by going to the Menu bar, Window Option, and select the View you want to show: Top View.