Subtitles of the Movie

Okay, so one of the things we have to deal with in 3D is describing the position and rotation and scale of an object in three dimensional space. This is done through the use of the Cartesian coordinate system. Zoom in over here for a moment in on a view port. This is called the front view, and the way I'm going to do this is by just tapping the space bar, and every time I tap the space bar and release it, I'm going to switch from a maximized view to multiple views, and as I hover over a different view, wherever the cursor is placed that's where this space bar is going to take effect. So heading over to the front view right now for a moment, when I'm in a what's called orthographic view, I have a flat or non-perspective view of the world. In this case, from the front of the scene. I'm going to select this ball, and you can see in the Channel Box over here on the right it is listed as having a translation of zero on the X, Y, and Z axes. Translation is another word for position or the movement of an object, so you'll often grab the Move tool to deal with the translation values, so they're essentially the same. So first thing I'm going to do when I select this object is head over to the Toolbox on the left here and choose the Move tool. When I switch to the Move tool, I can see I get little arrows on the object, and you'll notice I've turned on some gridlines here that tell me every fifth gridline where I am in the Maya units. As I drag that object using the Move tool over to the right, notice the Channel Box there is approaching a value of five on the X-axis, and I'm now going to lift it up on the Y-axis, and I've also reached approximately five units. If I take this object and head over to the other side of the center line, you'll see I now have a negative value, negative five units in the X-axis. One of the things that this important at this point is just to get a handle on changing the view of the scene here in the front view. If you just scroll your mouse wheel in and out, that's one way to truck the camera in and out of the scene. So I'm just getting closer and further from the center of this space on the screen right now. If I hold down the Alt key on the keyboard and then click the middle mouse button and drag, now I can pan that view. So from one of these orthographic views, these are the two camera controls. In and out, trucking, and I'm using the middle mouse button. You can also use another combination, which Alt and the right mouse button. That'll give you the same effect, or Alt the left and middle mouse buttons, also the same effect. But usually if you have a wheel mouse, you'll get in the habit of using that. And the other one is panning, Alt, middle mouse, and I can pan around. Okay? So as I change the position of the object in space, you can see those values updating in the Channel Box. If I move this at about the intersection of the 15 units on Y and 15 units on X and then verify this over here in the Channel Box, you can see that's where the object has been translated. Okay, now I'm going to, at this point, tap the space bar to go to my 3D view, tap it again to show just a perspective view as the center, and if I zoom out a little bit now, I'm going to need to use another key combination for camera, which is Alt and the left mouse button, and this allows me to tumble the view. So now I can that that object has been positioned, 15 on the X-axis, 15 up on Y, and it's staying put on the Z-axis. Okay, so we're going to cover that third dimension in the next movie.