Subtitles of the Movie

Now whether you're an experienced Poser user or brand new to this exciting program, I'd like you to go ahead and spend just a little time with this front end here on the interface. One of the reasons is, is that way we'll make sure we have a common language as I start describing some areas of the program, so that when I mention them without showing them later on in the tutorials you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Additionally, there are some secrets to the interface that you may not know, even if you've been working with Poser for a while. Now, you'll have to admit when you look at the Poser interface, it looks very different from most computer programs you work with. The reason is, is that Poser, along with another 3D program for Landscapes called Brice, and yet another program for Content Creation called, now it's called Correa, all used to be owned by the same company and had one of the same graphic user interface designers by the name of Kai Krause. His philosophy was, basically, why does something as cool and as visually rich as 3D, why do you need an interface that makes it look like it's a spreadsheet program? Make the interface look like what it does. And so, thankfully, we've got that to work with here in Poser 7. Many of the icons you see are fairly visually self-explanatory. Some may not be quite so obvious. There are a ton of things you can do with Poser and we'll just hit the high spots here on the interface, then we'll be getting into it in greater detail as we progress through the tutorial series. By default, when you open Poser, you are plunked right into the Poser room. Each one of these tabs are referred to as Rooms, so when I say the Materials' Room, to adjust textures on an object, or when I say the Face Room because we'll be working specifically with modifying the characteristics of a Poser face, you'll know what I'm talking about. Each capacity that you can work in in Poser has it's own room to do that, that's been kind of maximized or optimized for that given area. There are a couple of other things to take note of. Fortunately these have all been named to make things easier, but sometimes we'll get through the series and you'll notice that I seem to be missing some of my tools. Well, to maximize the screen space for the sake of this tutorial, there are times that I hide like the editing tools. Well, how do you hide the editing tools? You do that by simply double-clicking on the name above the set. So, by double-clicking on the tools right there, you'll notice that they disappear. I double-click they come back. Now, if you don't happen to like them there you can also click and drag these tools to where you would like them to go. So, this comes back again, to kind of the philosophy of Kai Krause in that you should be able to make this interface as comfortable as possible for the way you work. Also here, when we've got our Library's palette open here, you can click that. You may have to double-click it depending on whether it's activated or not, but to get that to hide. Additionally, you can go ahead and have this palette become it's own floating window by simply clicking the little icon right up here at the top it will float. Now, as I mentioned earlier in the first section, I'm working in a very small space for this tutorial. If I select this right now, instead of it appearing right in the middle of my screen I wind up getting a window that pops up substantially larger, more suited for my actual working space. To place this back into the Poser Pose Room, just click it again, and you'll see it link right up and then you can close that down. So, again, you can very easily customize your workspace for that. The items across the top of the screen I'll always refer to as our Menu Bar. This is where we go ahead and do things or call certain aspects up like if we want to go and open a palette that's not here right now. The Parameter Dials. The Macintosh keyboard shortcut notated for that is the Shift key plus the Apple key and the letter N. On the PC it will be the Control key, the Shift key and the letter N. When we open this palette; this is one you'll see me popping in and out of with great regularity using the keyboard shortcut. With the first few sections of our tutorial, I'll make sure to remind you what that keyboard shortcut is, and sometimes I'll pull it down from the window just so you can see visually where the reference is for that. But it's one that we hide and bring back many times to work with our character or various items in our Poser scene. To close a window you just press the X as you would guess, right there; pretty standard stuff. In the Pose room, our general area here that we'll be working with, happens to be camera controls and you'll notice as you roll over them that you've got the name that changes to let you know what that is. Another great feature of Poser, making sure that you're aware of what they are, even if you don't know what the function is. So, we've got our camera controls, we've got our lighting controls. Now something I do want to point out; and we're going to come back to each one of these and explore them in greater depth in an upcoming tutorial, specifically for that area, so again, we're just hitting the high spots about these, but I wanted to touch on some things that are unique. In the Lighting controls, when I move over different windows in the Preview area, you'll see the Lighting controls change. These little dots represent the lights shining back in, as you would guess, to this sphere, kind of one of those great visual graphic user interfaces that Poser has inherited through the years. But as I move my cursor over different rooms, the lights reposition themselves and the Lighting controls to reflect where they are compared to this view. Not rocket science to figure that out, but sometimes unless you're aware of that, it's something that you might miss. Also, for the UI dots, these are called Memory dots; they are little ways to change some preferred setups in your system. And then finally, we've got Document display down here that allows us to change how these figures are viewed on here. If you happen to have an older computer system you may want to choose one of these other Document preview styles to save your system resources. Down here, under the Texture shaded, that's one of the highest memory usage; uses the most progressive graphics card you might have for your system. If you're finding that as you scroll through your scene, or move through it with the camera controls that it's kind of chunky, you may want to go ahead and change to the Flat Shaded preview or the Lit Wireframe. Typically the Flat Shaded is the most economical on your system when you use it. In our next lesson we'll go ahead and start exploring some areas in greater detail, with the Menu Bar and keyboard shortcuts at the top of that list.