Subtitles of the Movie

Well, this movie is the last movie in the section working with Poser and Posing Props. What we're concentrating on In this movie, is how to convert imported props into their own figures. Well, why would you want to do that? Notice as we imported this boat into this scene it has become a sub-set. It's become a prop of our character. Now, that may not bother you, but it makes access a little more difficult when you start adding additional figures to the scene. If we wind up getting two or three people on the back of the boat, we've got a boat driver, maybe somebody fishing off the top; well, then, to get to the boat we always have to track down the figure and then we've got to go to the Prop section and track down the boat through the props. Now, you can do that, but I say, Why? There are a couple of ways to turn this into it's own figure in your scene, and we'll examine those now. One way is certainly easer than the other ways, but I have to point out both of those to you just because. Well, first, let's go ahead and select our boat here. You can see Simon, sub-set fishing boat; go to window and open up our Hierarchy Editor. I'm going to go ahead and close up the main categories; the person, the pants, the tee-shirt, and we see our Fishing Boat up here. Now, the last time, or the first time actually, we took a look at the Hierarchy Editor I didn't explain some of these icons that are going on. For any actual figure you've got this little Leonardo DaVinci type of teeny man in a circle. Any prop; it looks like a beach ball, something that the man would play with when he's bored, so you can tell the figures from the props simply by the icons. Now, reordering them in the Hierarchy Menu makes no difference for props. Props don't care. They'll still be considered a prop of the original set that it came in on, so we need to look for a different way to do that. Now, if we select the Fishing Boat line right here, it highlights; I did that rather garish turquoise color. And we've got an option down here that says create new figure. I wouldn't encourage you to push that button because that takes you to the Legacy, the old fashioned way of creating figures, which was a text-based system. Now if you like doing a lot of hand coding and writing scripts to turn items into figures, that's the one for you, but basically I guess I'm kind of lazy and would just as soon cut out 90 percent of that work and do it with a visual interface, and that's exactly what we'll do in the next one. But, I thought I would point that out to you, if you like working that way, and I've created props that way before. That's how you do it right out of Poser 7. So, we'll close our Hierarchy Editor. The way we're going to turn this boat into its own figure is by going to something we haven't examined yet, the Setup Room. Now this not a movie about how to use the set up room; that's coming up later in another section that we work on, specifically for the Set Up room, but sending the boat to the setup room will convert it automatically into it's own figure within your scene. What do you have to do to do that? Well, just click on the tab; let me get this ominous warning box that says, hey, you're taking a prop and getting ready to turn it into a figure. Are you sure you want to do this because I can't change it back after you do it. And we do. So I'll select Okay. We get another little window that pops up. Now we're in the set-up tab. We have different tools over here to work with. Some of them look very similar, but we've got an interesting one we'll look at that later in a another movie. But for right now know that this boat has come in; it has been converted into a new figure; we've got the internal names to work with here; that's fine with me; we're going to go ahead and leave this room. And when I go back to the Pose Room we're going to get a little warning. Well, let me explain what the warning is, first. The Set up room is where we would take this boat if I had made it so that this door opened, we could make it so that the door opens in Poser and is controllable by a dial. But since I haven't done that then we have no, what are called, bonds, and no joints to worry about, so the warning that we're going to get says, hey, look, you're creating a figure that I can't bend, is that okay? Let's go ahead and go to the pose tab. We get this warning that says, Whoops. You've got polygons that don't belong to a bond; that means it can't bend. Are you sure you want to do this? And, I do. Back here in our Pose room. It comes in now and we see that now we've got a new figure. You can go ahead and name that figure, but you can see it is it's own element now, it's no longer a sub-set of the character itself. So there is a very effective way to use the Set up menu to create individual figures of imported props from other 3D programs. In our next section we'll start off with how to work with the morphing of characters and magnets.