Subtitles of the Movie

I know. I know. You wanted to hop right into the Poser 7 tutorial, but there are a couple of little items we need to take care of first before we get into that involving your system preferences for Poser and the actual differences between computer platforms. I am authoring this tutorial series on a Macintosh computer. That means that some of the phrases I'll use for keyboard shortcuts translate differently. And I do my best to, you know, say well, this is it for the Mac and this is it for the PC, so when I say Command Click something on the Macintosh side, know that that means Control Click for the PC side. There is a little bit of confusion in the fact that the Macintosh also has a Control button, so when I say Control Click, that's actually equal to the right-click on a PC. Now if you happen to have a multi-button mouse, for the Macintosh, well, then the right-click is going to function just like the right-click on the PC. One other item I don't have up here is that I'll mention using an Option key; that also translates to the Alt key on the PC system. So let's go ahead and take a look now at some of the preferences we'll want to set up or refine in your Poser installation to get the most out of your Poser program on your given computer system. Now if you haven't worked with 3D programs before, they are absolute memory hogs. They'll use as much RAM as you've got and then they'll ask for more, regardless of how much you've got. So if you need an excuse to go ahead and upgrade your system, eh, Poser 7 is a great reason to go ahead and do that. You'll find your options right up here under the Poser Item in the menu bar up here. On the Macintosh it's Command K; that should translate then to Control K on the PC. Now we've got several tabs to take a look at in our general preferences. One of the items here, and the defaults for most of these are okay, like the smoothing for the crease angles here, but there are times and some of the things you'll want to change right here. For the sake of this tutorial, I'm working in a much smaller space than my monitor actually is: 1024 by 768 pixels. Now that's probably as small as you'd want to go with this particular program because it's got quite a few menus and a very graphically rich interface and you just can't fit all that into a small space. So, since I have a small area to work in I created a custom layout and then saved it, and now I ask this program to launch to the preferred state. Also, I've got my Mac's undo levels, and I think this is the default, but it may not be, for 100. Sometimes you get a little ways down the path and you decide, you know what? This isn't where I want to go, when you're modeling with Poser, and it's easy just to go ahead and undo and go back, realize that the higher this number is, the more memory, or system resources, it'll be taking from your system. On the Interface side, here's something that's very important to take note of. If you happen to work with a WACOM tablet like I do, it's very, very important to go ahead and engage Tablet Mode. To not do so means that as you use the track-ball to start moving your camera around you'll get some very spastic and irregular type of input, so do check this off if you're working with a graphical tablet. I always like mine to launch to the previous state just so I've got some continuity instead of always back to the factory state, so I have that checked. Now, since I happen to be in the United States of America, I do have the American standard display unit set at feet. This is where you go ahead and change to either smaller increments for that, or if you'd like to work with a metric system, this is the place to do that. As you get further along in your Poser experience, you start grabbing things out of the library; you can kind of see that exhibited over here, and this is how you control some of those behaviors; how you search for those files, and we may be adjusting some of these more as we go on to it, but I generally leave mine here, just like this. Here's one that is important to take a look at right now. By default the memory is set to Adaptive and I would leave that there, but if you happen to have a computer that has multiple processors, you can go ahead and increase the number of threads, or how the computer approaches a render in a Poser scenario. This will allow you to maximize the use of your multi processors if you have them. There is an option to have separate processes for each one of those threads. There are times you'd want to do that with high resolution types of renders for print, or if you're doing some fairly complex animations later on, but right now, as we do most of the renders right to the screen engaging the separate processes actually takes longer because the computer is busy dividing all that up before you start getting into a render. So I leave that off just to save us time. Under the Miscellaneous section there's an important area to note right here, and that is Save Files. There is an option to use File Compression, and if you happen to be working with fairly limited extra disk space this is a great option to check to make sure that you don't wind up bloating with all these files, the remaining free space that's on your hard disk. Now you may be wondering, well, if that's such a good idea, why wouldn't you do it all the time? Well, I happen to work in 3D and graphics professionally, which means my livelihood comes from reliability and I'm always paranoid about making sure my files are in good shape. Any type of disk catastrophe, or file contamination, compressed files are much more difficult to get valuable data back out of. So, I'm willing to buy some extra disk storage and spend the money that way just to ease my paranoid nature. That's the reason I don't use file compression; probably more than you wanted to know, but hey. As far as the Temp files, if the program does crash, or you want to know where, I'm just, you know, send that to a different directory for your own benefit, this is the place that you do that, right there. We'll leave the Python Editor alone for right now, but this is how you get back into it, and select it. It is possible to have multiple Python installations on some computers, and this is how you can select which one of those Python editors you would want to use. Well, with that said, let's go ahead and get ready to move into our next lesson, and that's looking at why this interface is set up in this particular fashion.