Subtitles of the Movie

Let's go ahead and start taking a little closer look at some of the areas of the User Interface here in Poser 7. Now each one of these areas, you can go into a lot of detail on and we're not going to sit here bore you to tears by going into the minutia as we go through these different areas. We'll start getting more and more fine-grained the further into the program as we go. What we'll deal with first is the Menu Bar, up here at the top of the program. The reason I want to do this first is because I'll start relying heavily on keyboard shortcuts as we get further into the tutorial. As you start getting into more and more complex scenes, instead of always dragging to windows and opening them up, and engaging certain options by finding them from the Menu Bar up here at the top. It's certainly much easier and much faster to simply use the keyboard shortcuts. I didn't want to discuss some of these real briefly as we go into them. Obviously like most computer programs, your basic functionality from Poser comes from the File menu, by that I mean Open, Close, some of those items there, Python Scripting; we'll get into that a little bit later on; not exactly stuff for the beginner. Under the Edit Menu, here's where you again have some real basic functions for the interface: the Cut, Copy, Paste. Now you'll see things like Restore and Memorize. These items right here relate to this little interface down here, the UI dots, which stands for User Interface Dots. We'll get into that, especially as we start getting into scene building as ways to save yourself some time as you work with some more complex camera rigs and light rigs that you'll be working with. Under the Figure, this one we'll be coming in to a lot as we start working with the actual figure itself. Most of the names are fairly self-explanatory here. We'll play with these as we get into working with the figures themselves, but know that if you fundamentally want to change some component of the figure, it's in the most logical spot, under the Menu Bar portion of the figure. The big one here is always Command D, Drop To the Floor as we insert items in here. The Floor being the ground plane, so we'll be coming up and revisiting this as we start working with that. Symmetry is another one. Now many of these functions do not have keyboard shortcuts. Which one has a keyboard shortcut? It's the one that always has some little cryptic description over here on the right-hand side. So in the case of this, Drop To the Floor, if you're on the Apple system it's Command D; if you're on a PC it'll be Control D. Simply pushing those keys will let whatever is up in the air drop down to the ground plane. Right now our figure is standing on the ground plane, but if we'd moved him, or inserted a sphere or some primitive shape like that we could have it immediately arrive down at the lowest level easily; same thing for Hide Figure. When you get into real complex scenes just Control H or Apple H on the Mac, is an easy way to hide that so it doesn't use your resources on the computer as you turning and moving through the scene. Under Object pull-down, you've got something called Properties. Right now you'll see that we've got Simon G2 selected, the default of Poser figure that comes in. If we go ahead and check Properties here we get a window that pops up. Now there are several ways to get to this window. Right now we've got the Properties, just like it said from the object, but there's another feature we also want to get to and that's Parameters. If we come over here to the window, and I'm jumping along at the top on the Menu Bar window, we can get to something called the Parameter dials here, but notice it's got a different keyboard shortcut. In this case, on the Macintosh it's Shift Command N. On the PC it will be Shift Control N. Well, while it says Parameter Dials, it just pops you in over here so there is a difference from the Property but both these areas are co-located in this one palette window. So there are a couple of ways to get this activated and then you can flip to the tabs. One is the Control I or Command I, the other is the Shift Command or Shift Control N. Go ahead and close this here with that X. The Objects are also where you create the items that you want that are not figures in the scene; additional magnets which are used to shape forms differently, and of course, lights, camera, wind, those types of items, too. Under Display we've got a ton of stuff here. This is where the keyboard shortcuts really start popping up. When you start flipping around a scene, or if you have a single window open instead of the four like we have here, it's nice to be able to change those camera positions just with a keystroke. Well, some of these like the Right, Left or Front cameras, you can't actually turn while you're in it. It will always be facing from the right or from the front, so to switch to another camera view you can always come up to Display Camera View, and in this case if we wanted to go to left we could you know select that, but it gets to be a little bit of a cumbersome process, so it's a great thing what they've done with Poser in adding all of these keyboard shortcuts to make it easier for you to flip through the program. Again here, we had talked about the best way, during Document Display, to show your scene and maybe to conserve resources. When you start getting a lot of subject matter in here. I mentioned that we're in Texture Shaded; that happens to be Command N or Control N on the PC. This is how you can flip through these real quickly. So, instead of coming down here, I mean these are conveniently located, Real next to the Modeling window here, the Preview window. It's easy to grab one and get that, but if we have one selected like that again I can pop this back to the shaded preview by doing the keyboard shortcut. Display also has some other great functions we'll be getting into as we start Posing, and that has to do with Guides. These don't have shortcuts, but it's nice to drop these in just to help you visually see, like in this case, the hip-shoulder relationship, so it'll be popping up there. So Display, really as you would think from the name, doesn't necessarily mean that it's something that controls how your monitor behaves, like the other display controls on a computer. This Display is how your figure is displayed within Poser. We've got some render options we'll be getting into, and again, popping into these you're doing Quick Renders; much easier to do that with the keyboard shortcut than tracking it down. Or, Animation pull-downs right, here have some functionality things in terms of different types of interpolation that are used for motion. Then we've got windows, which are loaded with shortcuts, and finally some scripting and other areas that we'll get into. So that's it for the Menu Bar tour. In our next lesson we'll start taking a look at the Properties palette and how you use that to get information on your figure or objects.