Subtitles of the Movie

We'll continue our exploration of Electric Image Animator's Interface with two very important Windows. They can both be accessed via the Window Menu, or by pressing Command T for Tool Palette, or Command L for Project List. The Tool Palette, which can be converted from a horizontal orientation to a vertical by clicking on this button, is where most of your 3D manipulation tools exist. The Project Window lists all of the objects inside your 3D scene as well as the Timeline. Now you can select any 3D object from any of the four World Views, like this gear, but when you have a scene that has several 3D objects in it, maybe hundreds of them, selecting them this way might be difficult at best. It's hard to cut through the crowds to find just that object you want to select. That's why it's easier sometimes if you have a list of objects within your scene to go to the Project Window and simply select the object. It could be a model, or a camera, or a light, that you want to manipulate. And of course, once an object is selected then all the tools that are available to manipulate or affect that object appear in the Tool Palette. All the attributes for any object in your 3D scene can be accessed through the Project Window. Simply double-click an object and the Info Window for that object appears with all its associated tabs of information, such as this first tab, which is X-form, which shows the position, rotation, and scale data for that selected object. Now, this Info Window changes when you select a different type of object. For instance, when I switch to Camera, the Camera Info Window has different attributes: Field of View, Rotoscoping, Projection Map, et cetera, and again, if I double-click on one of the lights, the Light Info Window has its own set of attributes. Also, because the Project Window has a Timeline, this is where you'll be setting up and editing your animation. For instance, if I wanted to animate this gear I would move the Time thumb to a later point in time, make sure I have the gear selected and simply move it, or rotate it in any fashion that I'd like, and as you can see by the Keyframes in our Project Window we have an animation. There's also available, through the Window Menu, a separate Time Palette, which is simply a Timeline that you can scrub through without having a list of the objects in your scene. I tend not to use the Time Palette very much because I already have a Timeline inside the Project Window and I'm always going back to the Project Window to change attributes or set keyframes. One other nifty Interface feature that Animator presents you is the ability to show rulers and you can access that by going to the Window Menu again and selecting Show Rulers, or Command M. Rulers will appear in each one of the three orthographic views and their numbers correspond to the coordinates listed at the bottom of each one of those windows. Rulers become especially helpful when determining distance between objects, say for setting depth of field, or fog, or any of those effects, and rulers are also helpful with some of the plugins in Electric Image in determining the distance that that plug-in affects within the 3D scene.