Subtitles of the Movie

Let's talk about keeping your work organized inside Animator. The Project Window is the way to do that. When you add more models to your scene, set hierarchies, add lights, your scene becomes more complex. Selecting certain objects becomes harder, especially when you have to scroll through so many items in the Project Window. In this project I have dozens of water bottles. As they fall over the Camera moves backward and up. The chore here is that I have multiple objects per water bottle. Each bottle is made up of a cap, the bottle itself, the water inside the bottle, and associated textures, and that's just one bottle. As you can see, my Project Window's pretty full. The items in the Project Window can be sorted in a number of ways. The default method is by hierarchy, but there are others. Go up to the Mini Toolbar in the top of the Project Window and you'll see what looks like a triangle made up of dashes. Click on that and you'll see Sort Modes, or Project View Modes. We see that Hierarchy is currently selected, which puts the Camera and Lights above the models, which are, in turn, organized hierarchically in the list. If we click on that button and choose by name, then the hierarchy with its indents disappears and the list is organized alphabetically. Notice that the lights and the camera move down the list. Let's go back to Hierarchy View. I can rename my camera to, let's call it, the A Camera, and the Value text field at the top of the Project Window, then hit Enter. And back to View by Name, and now you can see a camera's at the Top of my alphabetical list. Let's click on the Project View Mode again. You can also sort by Material. This groups all the objects together that have the same texture materials; or by Label. As you can see I have colored the text of my model groups. I can change the color of a group by selecting it, or drag selecting multiple objects and then go up to the tiny color wheel in the Mini Toolbar, and selecting a new color. Viewing the list by label organizes the groups in the order of the colors in this popup menu. You'll probably spend most of your time in hierarchical views, so let's go back to that. You can see that I have several sets of hierarchies. If I don't want to see the entire list, I can choose a parent and hide its children by going to the Hierarchy Menu and selecting Show Hide Children, or Command-Shift-H. If you use the keyboard shortcut on your Macintosh, be sure you hold down the Shift key, because Command H will hide the entire application. You may think you have crashed and lost all your work, so press Command-Shift-H to hide the children. All of my bottles belong to a parent called All Bottles. So, if I select that and press Command-Shift-H, then all of the children and their hierarchies are hidden. A tiny red triangle indicates that there are children hidden from view. Press Command-Shift-H again and they all reappear. Keeping organized is of paramount importance when your project starts to get large. Animator's Project View Modes can help you quickly find several objects at once. I also think you'll make extensive use of the Labeling system.