Subtitles of the Movie

In our last lesson I mentioned that we were using the most common palette to be used in Poser and that was the Properties palette and Parameters palette. The second most common palette to be used is the Library palette, and that's located over here by default on the right side of your screen. So I'll roll my mouse over it and you can see the little handle lighting up letting you know that you can do something there. So if I click this, this is kind of the default way that it rolls out; I happen to have mine in poses already, but let's go to the top level. You can see up here that this header describes what you're seeing down here. Below that we've got a sub-header that's the category that it's in. If I click this disclosure triangle right here I can come down to Poses, and see a variety of pose areas that I can go into. Now, that's floating off the tutorial window here for you while you're looking at it, so go ahead and try that on your own system so you can get a chance to look at that. Then come back up here to Figures and to get to a top level you simply click your folder up. If I come back here to Poses, that right now is Expressions; let's come back to Poses, to get into the top level of the Poses or the next level up, I just double-click on this given folder and it takes me up to the next one so we can see we've got hand-shake, meeting, on the phone, standing; if we click this disclosure triangle, those same options will flip out and you'll be able to access it there, so there are a couple of different ways to get to these files on your system. Let me come back up here to Figures and let's go ahead, or actually, let me, let me come back down here to; well, we'll stay with figures for now. Let's go ahead and grab something else like the Wildlife Series. You can see that we've only got one category, a sub-category in the EF Wildlife Series that ships by default with Poser and that's the Big Horn Sheep. We double-click that folder and we can see the sheep there. Now later on you might have more sheep, I don't know, but for any additional figure within a folder you can have sub-categories, so if you get items from different content providers, or from Content Paradise, you wind up with many selections in your sub-folders. You'll notice that once you get into an area, and especially if you select an object, you do have additional figures down here with their own little tool-tip helps that tell you what goes on. If I happen to select the one check here I would lose Simon G in the Room and in his place would be the Big Horn Sheep. If I wanted to add this sheep to the imagery or to the scene, then I simply select the Create New Figure, or the double check mark. Now there are times you would import objects from a different program, or different 3D models into your Poser scene. If you had one of those in your scene after doing an import but wanted to add it to your Library so you could use it later, then you would use the plus button down here for that. Likewise, if you've got something that you're no longer using, or you feel has become obsolete in your collection, just select the minus button and that will be deleted out of your Library. Now this is a very small, kind of cumbersome way to get through the Library's palette. You have to keep clicking up and down. We can do that with the Disclosure triangle. Another alternative way to view your content is to come up here and select this icon and float this palette, or detach it, from the right side of your screen. If I select that now, yours may open up a little bit smaller, it may open up to the side; it usually looks about like this when you open it up. I have mine expanded right here so that I can see many things all at once. We come back over here to Poses and say let's look at you know, something for a meeting. This gives me the ability to see all this content very easily, but obviously this entire floating palette is also obscuring my Preview window and my Pose window. That's the advantage of having it over on the right-hand side of the screen. You can make it hide and disappear real quick; well, you can do the same thing with the keyboard shortcuts. When we were looking at our menus up here at the top we noticed under Window that we've got down here Libraries, we can see that checked right now. The keyboard shortcut to get to the Library's palette on the Mac is Shift Command B, on the PC it will be Shift Control B to do that. So, if I engage that keyboard shortcut now, the window goes away, I can see my Preview window. If I want to have this larger I can just drag this out and start maximizing my screen space. Now, you'll notice that, over here on the right-hand side, it looks like this drawer has you know, popped back up, and if I click it again, I'm going to have to detach it again. Not true. When you click this button now, if you've already detached it, then what happens next is that it comes back up in the last saved state. So, it looks like it's over on the right-hand side, but when you click that it comes all the way back and then you can go ahead and just select close the window. So, you do get multiple ways to show this particular floating palette. Reviewing the categories, you would think these are very self-explanatory, and you know what? For the most part they are. We've got Figures, so if we select that it looks like all we've is Big Horn Sheep. Well, we need to go up one in the directory, double-click on that folder, and you can see the additional figures we've got here, especially the human figures under the different Poser categories so that we can get into those. If we look at Poser 7 we've got some new animals; we've got some different vehicles in here, and different people. We go to Sydney and see that but let me explain some of the differences that happened over here. There are many, many people that prepare content for Poser 7 and other, or I should say, other content besides people. It can be airplanes, it can be cars, it can be buildings, scenery. You would think that those would all occur under figures. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It really kind of depends on who is putting those together and what directory they've specified them into. Sometimes those objects are under Props and you'll find things; now this is the basic Props that ship with Poser, but know that sometimes when you install content that you purchase separately from Poser that it may not always occur exactly where you think you might find it. Especially important is that when you get additional characters and come to Pose, sometimes poses are different options for objects, like cars, as well, where you can manipulate doors and open those. So, as we get into that we'll explore this in a little bit more detail, this is the; everything you see here you'd expect to find with the human figure; it makes perfect sense. As you start getting into more robust usages of Poser 7 you may have things distributed slightly differently in your Library palette. In our next lesson we'll take a quick spin through the camera controls and animation controls just for familiarity sake, and then we'll keep moving on.