Subtitles of the Movie

In this lesson we take a look at one of the most used palettes in Poser, and that happens to be the Properties palette or the Parameters palette. Remember we touched on this real briefly when we said there are two ways to get to it. One is to pop over here to windows and come down to Parameter Dials. That's Shift Command N on the Macintosh or Shift Control N on the PC. Also, under Object we have Properties, which on the Macintosh is Command I; on the PC it's Control I. Let's go ahead and pop this open right now. Why is this the most used palette of all of them in Poser? Well, it's because you can control everything about anything that you select in Poser. Right now we've got Simon G2 is highlighted right over here and you can see up here that we've got the name called Chest. Let's explore some of the details we can deal with right here in the Properties palette, or Parameters palette depending on which one of these tabs you have open. As you'd expect, for typical navigation we've got a little minus sign right here. If we click on that it collapses it, just like other standard functions, especially on the PC. We can go and click that and open that. Now it doesn't look like there's much here to hide, but when you get into some complex figures you wind up getting many, many options that you can adjust the look of your figure with. Sometimes it's nice to close some of those off just so you have access to others more easily. The Parameter Section of this window that pops up here gives you all the variables that you can control about a given area. Now there are two ways to change what is presented right here. One is to come up here to this disclosure triangle and select, in this case, body parts, since we have a human selected right here, and we can go from chest to the neck area. Now you'll notice nothing changed right here, but watch what happens when we change to something like head. Well, there we go. We have right here, Face Morphs. Now we can go ahead and click this little disclosure area here, the plus sign, and we can work with eyes, and this is why you start using this palette more than any other in Poser because you can control very specifically all of the features. Now, since we're on eyes, and I've got that open, why would you want to use the Properties, or the Parameter's tab to adjust some of the features here? Well, we've got things we can't get anywhere else here, and that's why is the first reason. Like blink left, blink right, those types of things, but the other reason you would want to do this is that if we select something specifically like the right eye, whereas you can control dilate, but more important is the movement right here. When we've got side-to-side, if you have a character, and I'll hop over here to a feature we'll look at more closely in the future, the Face Cam. When you have a character and you want them looking in a certain direction you do have the ability to come in here; you can see that little circle highlighted, which is the eye, and I can actually change my tools to rotate; and don't panic, we'll come back to this, although you may be familiar with that already. We can directly change and rotate this eye by moving it around. Many times people will come in and move the eyes and get them to almost look right. Well, what do I mean by almost? Let's say when you see the final render, we can see right here on this character, that the eyes aren't lined up. The Parameter's palette gives you the ability to make sure that the eyes match in terms of looking so you don't have a character that looks like it has lazy eye or cross-eye or something like that. We can see here that we've got the side-by-side at negative 16. We come over here to the Disclosure triangle again and come down to left eye, we can immediately enter a value of negative 16. Now both eyes are looking with the same direction; they're not misaligned or anything like that. So if you happen to grab and move a given object, like a hand or an eye you can create a, you know, especially for the eyes, exact duplications of that movement right here in the Parameters portion of this area. Now let's look at the other area for properties right here. I mentioned earlier you've got the ability to hide things right now. We have the left eye selected right now, but if I come back to body, we've got the whole body of this character selected, we can either come up here to Figure and do Hide Figure with the keyboard shortcut so that it's not there, not using our computer resources, or you can do the same thing in the Properties tab. This becomes just another easy access point. That is, you work with given figures and are jumping around between different items in your scene, to hide it or unhide it you can do right here in the Properties tray. So these are some of the most common functions that you'll be using between the Parameters and the Properties tab. These are scrollable and again, if you haven't; we're changing the size of our figure right here. I'm using a WACOM tablet. If you are also using a tablet but you haven't used in your system Preferences or you haven't engaged the Make Tablet Compatible, or Tablet Compatibility Mode, when you scroll these dials sometimes things go absolutely wild right here, and so that's a reason to go back to those Preferences if you haven't done that and adjust that so that you remain or retain the control of your object. In our next section we'll go ahead and start looking at the Library and how you get around that and how that's been organized to accelerate the development of your Poser 7 scenes.