Subtitles of the Movie

So now we're going to go ahead and give you a brief overview of how to author Dynamic Components. Now right up front I want to tell you that there's way, way too much to cover about Dynamic Components and all that you can do with them in even one chapter of a video series like this, so to do anything in one video is just going to be very, very miniscule compared to what you can do, but what we're going to do here is we're going to take this geometry that I created and we're going to break it up into three separate pieces by the colors that you currently see and then we're going to make it so that each of these different color areas are configurable using Dynamic Components. So the very first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Window, Materials and I'm going to go ahead and start selecting materials and I'm going to go ahead and say Select and then I'm going to go ahead and say Edit, Make Group and I'm going to click off that guy. And then I'm going to go over here, Select, Edit, Make Group and then I'm going to click off that guy. And then I'm going to say Select, Edit, Make Group and then I'm going to click off that guy. So here we have our different groups as you can see and the really interesting thing about this is, because they're grouped by material we can easily find these in something like the Outliner, so let's go ahead and open the Outliner. I'm going to go ahead and minimize this guy for a second, dock the Outliner underneath. So if I click here on these different groups I have a pretty clear idea of what I'm looking at, so this group, for instance, here is going to be the actual lights in this neon sign, so I'm just going to go ahead and rename that group lights, and then hit Enter and then this group is the trim, so I'm just going to rename that trim and hit enter and this last group would be the sides, so I'm just going to rename that sides, hit Enter. So now we have this set up in our Outliner, we have it set up by Material. Now the next thing that I want to do in order to make this a Dynamic Component is I actually want to select all of them at once, so I'm just going to go say Edit, Select All and then I'm just going to say Make Component and we'll just name this one jason text and we'll just say Create. So now jason text has three groups within it. This is going to become important in a second. So now if we go to View, Toolbars, Dynamic Components you'll see we have our old friend the Interact Tool and we also have Component options, but what we're really looking for here is Component Attributes and if I click on that you'll see that we have our main component, which is jason text, then we have lights, trim and sides and we can edit each of these independently. So, I'm just going to click on the Plus sign next to lights and I'm going to go ahead and add an attribute and when I add an attribute basically what I'm telling it here to do is I want to make something happen when someone clicks on this particular group, so I'm going to say onClick and now it's going to ask me well what do I want that onClick to do? Well, I happen to have already set up on a text pad exactly what I want it to do, so I'm just going to go ahead and bring this down and you can see here that I have a bit of code that I have written out and what I'm telling this onClick to do is set the material for that particular object to these different hexadecimal values each time someone clicks, so I'm just going to copy that and I'm going to go ahead and paste it into this field and then I'm going to hit Tab to exit out of that. And now I'm going to repeat that for each of these, so I'm just going to go ahead and Add an attribute, I'm going to choose onClick, and then, for the trim, I'm just going to go ahead and copy the trim and I'm going to paste it into this field here and then I'm going to hit Tab and notice these all have different hexadecimal values and then for the last one I'm going to go ahead and Add an attribute, onClick and I'm going to go ahead and copy and then paste in here and then tab out of that. So now I have my different hexadecimal values set into each one of these. Now the next thing I need to do is I need to actually get rid of the materials that were currently on here. These are going to interfere, so I'm just going to go ahead now and Refresh this like so and then I'm going to minimize this for a second and then I'm going to go ahead and bring this right back up, yeah. So now we're going to go back to our Materials, there we are, I knew the Materials were around here somewhere and I'm going to go into my Layers and I'm going to open up each Layer, Edit, Select All and replace that with our Default Color. Edit, Select All, replace with our Default Color and then I get to the sides, there we go, Edit, Select All and replace with the Default Color. So now everything should be white if that's your Default Color. And that's exactly what we have, and you know, if we go in here with our hover over you'll see that we actually have the ability now to interact with these different components. So I'm just going to go ahead and click on this face and click on that trim - I need to get a little closer to click on the trim here - there we go, so you can see now that we actually have activated the Dynamic Component functionality here. So that is basically more or less how we would work with this set of Attributes, so each one of these now has different Color Attributes set up inside of it that's going to refer to this jason text component, it's now a Dynamic Component. I can close this out, we're done. I can go ahead and say Purge Unused to get rid of any colors here that I don't want to use, close this out and now I can simply work right in here just like I would work with any other Dynamic Component, use my Interact Tool and I can click to my heart's content until I get all the various options of what I want. Now, some of these are not going to be really apparent, like for instance the side colors until you get some light going on here so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go ahead and turn on shadows, there we go and now when we're clicking through those colors on the side will become a lot more obvious to you. So this is just one of those situations where you may have lots of variety that you're looking to do something but this is a great way of building a very simple and yet very flexible Dynamic Component.