Subtitles of the Movie

In this third movie on the Document window area, we pick up where we left off with the last one; that's exploring the Render tab. I want to be careful to say that this is not the section on Rendering. There are many things to consider with rendering, but this tab does give you access to some of those controls; more importantly, it gives you some comparative tools for your renderings. Down here in the lower right-hand corner, and again, I'll direct your attention to the top here where we've got the document title that says Untitled because we haven't saved this document, but we've got before and afters. If we click on that, or you, right here we can see the time of day and the date that this was last rendered, then we've got the one we just did, and you can check and compare any number of renders that you've done to compare those two together. If we go back to our Preview window and let's say, just for the sake of argument, we took this light and we're going to change the color of it, and we'll get more into this later, but just something blue, and say, a little blue cast on the character's face right there, go ahead and select Render again. Now that that's completed we can go ahead and compare these two and it's a very easy way to say, well, do I like the warm color from the right side, or do I like the blue color? So this is the kind of comparative work you can do with Poser very easily, and if you do multiple renders and want to compare them all then you can just use these and select which ones you want to use for those comparisons. It's a great way to save some time. We've got some rendered dimensions up here right now. What's showing is the pixel dimensions of the document that I have right here. If you click on that you can specify Match to Preview Window which is what I did, the Preview window right over here from this tab, or we can say Fit in Preview Window, if it happens to be specified to be larger, or we can render to exact dimensions where you go ahead and fill in the pixels that you want it to be and the final resolution in pixels per inch. You also have the option to Match Document window with that and constrain the aspect ratios; again, we'll get into more detail on the specific render settings when we get to that section. Go ahead and move this back to Match Preview and click OK. Let's go back to the Render tab at default, and we are kicked back to the Preview window, and that's the difference here when you're working in the Document window itself versus the actual render area when we work with that. We'll go back to render. You've got the ability here to, let's say I want to render this full-size, half-size, or quarter-size. Now this does not change the settings you specify here, but for the sake of argument, if I had a render that was 640 pixels by something and I went to half-size, it would show it at 320 pixels by whatever the other dimension was, however, the specifics would still be there, so when I kicked it back to full it would render at the previous size. The advantage to using these smaller ones is that if you're just doing a comparative render again, real quickly, you're changing lighting, or changing the ways shadows interact, well, this is a way to accelerate that rendering so you don't have to sit around and wait quite as long. Three-D rendering simply take time. The other option you've got here, and we'll go into some of these Render details in more detail later, or the Render Engines, or how it calculates and creates the picture. FireFly is probably the best one to use, and that's why it's the default, but you can go back to some other faster ones to Poser 4 Sketch is a fast renderer, but it also has a very cool look and we'll get into that and additional detail as well within the final Preview. If you do want to render to a new window, and you'll notice we've got the same camera controls and area render here, if we wanted to just render up on the face you can select this and click right where the face is and it will do a new render, just for that spot; again, another easy way to save some time. Now, if we want to do a Tear-off, or a new render here, we can do it just like that, and we can start stacking these things up, depending on the size of your monitor area, if you'd like to, so you can compare renders that way, as well. I'll say don't save. Again, we can pan through this. We do have the same option controls over here, so there's nothing new there. One thing that I haven't explored with you is that we have a full screen toggle. For the sake of this tutorial, as I mentioned earlier, I have reduced the workspace here so it fits conveniently onto your screen and to the CDs for these movies as we go over this stuff, but if I click this, it will expand to the full size of my screen. I happen to have a very large screen right now, and you can see most of this goes off the page, but that's a quick, easy way to maximize to your screen if you're working in a smaller area. I'll just click it again and you come right back here. So this is the Document Window in a nutshell right here. You can compare renders with one another from the Render tab after you do that we also have the tools to go ahead and more easily compare our characters in 3D space by using the different view port views right here. In our next section that we'll start here, we'll get into the actual posing of the characters and that's where the fun begins.