Subtitles of the Movie

With this lesson we kind of close out our speed tour through the interface portion of the Poser 7 tutorial series. The one thing that we're going to deal with here, or the primary thing, is going to be Camera Controls. They are critical; to know how to use those things effectively, and all the variable options that you've got, to successfully and quickly build the scenes you would like to work with. And we will touch on some of the UI controls, and then real briefly on animation, but primarily we're going to cover some of the ways that you can get through your scene with a camera. Now as you notice here in the Preview window we've got four views selected. One thing we haven't talked about is how you change this. You can simply come down here to the Disclosure triangle at the bottom of the Preview window and select; mine is kind of going out of the complete tutorial window area; it will adjust itself to match your screen, but you can select a view that's going to be the most useful to the way you're posing. Typically I like to work in kind of the quad view down here. The four-port. Until I want to get into specific detailing. And the reason why I like to work in this view is I get a good sense of where everything is in the scene, but there are also some special camera features to zoom in on things that I need to see. One that you saw me use in an earlier movie was located right up here, so let's take a look at these in a little more detail. The important thing to note is that as you roll over these different areas they do light up above, so you can see that I'm in the Face Cam. If I click this right now, here in the Main view, or the Active view, and the Active view is whichever one that has this red line running around it. If I happen to be in this view here and then selected Face Camera, this view would change to the Face Camera, so it's important to know that whichever your active view port is in your Window, that that's the one that's going to be affected by the camera change. Now there are some other ways to kind of get through and select cameras, so I selected the Face Camera, great. Well, how do I get back to that main camera that I was working with? Well, there's a bunch of ways to do that. The easiest way is to go ahead and come up here to the Disclosure triangle at the top and select a camera. Doing so will expose all the camera options that you've got. Here is one of those shortcuts that is good to memorize. To get back to the main camera on the Apple it's just Command M. On the PC it's Control M. So, to get back to that view, once you've got to the Face Camera you can just go ahead and do the keyboard shortcut and it pops back right to where it wants to be. Another way to do it is right here. Each one of these titles of the camera in the room you can select that by either right-clicking or control-clicking if you're on the Mac. This way you also get the other camera options that you have right there, and you can choose them accordingly. Let's say we came into the Posing Camera something like that. We also have some other options we haven't talked about yet and that's whether you're using an open GO Renderer from your computer to preview these scenes. That's the optimal best one to use for your Poser scenes, but there's another one called 3D. And that's just a different renderer that you may have a little more success with on your system if you don't have some of the most up-to-date graphics cards and drivers. Again, we have Tune Tones here, if we open a pop-down to that; we'll explore those options later but those do come up when you either right-click or Control click on these camera areas. Come back to our Main camera view here. One thing that's nice is when you start posing hands, there are hand cameras so you can zoom right into the hands that you want to do some specific posing. The icon changes right here and every time you click on this icon you go ahead and rotate to another camera, so you do have the ability, simply by clicking on this icon to rotate through the full selection of cameras that you have. We'll do the keyboard shortcut and get back to the Main camera. Other options here for moving either left or right, x and y. And let's talk about how you navigate through 3D space in Poser 7. Well, you remember those math classes, and all that time you spent with plotting curves on a graph that you probably don't want to remember. Well it's time to remember them, because that's how you relate to space here. On those old graphs you'll remember that x was always along the bottom axis, left to right; y was always the top to bottom portion. Well, now we introduce something new, and that's the z-axis in space. Z-axis is the distance between the character and the camera in this particular view; it's front to back. So, when we say move along x- and y-axis and grab this little hand in the active view pane we're going to move left and right. We can also move up and down, but it keeps the camera; it doesn't allow it to get any closer or any farther away from the object that it's pointing at. We've got the move y- and z-. So now, we can go up and down, but we can also zoom in and out along that z-axis. To get a combination of all those tools, you can grab the central one right here and it kind of combines everything. It's a general camera movement tool, so you can move along the x-, y-, and the z-axis. Finally, the primary control down here is your track-ball. This allows you to rotate around the selected object. It keeps it at the same distance, you can get below it; you can get above it. This is another one where if you haven't changed your Preferences to Tablet Mode Enabled, and you're using a tablet, you're probably flying all over the area. It's important to get that one set up. I'm going to expand my window just a little bit so we can see some of this better. I expanded this, you'll notice that suddenly I can't see the entire object, and this is where you would use some of those controls here to kind of pan through the scene and bring everything back into position. The last thing we'll take a look at here are these little dots. It's important to note, as you look up here at the top left-hand corner what the names of those are: Roll, as you would expect, is how the camera rolls. Scale is kind of the size of the camera, and then Focal Length is like turning it from a 35 millimeter to a different camera; well, there's a lot of guesswork involved in getting that just right. Well, here's a case where when we have the camera selected it's a good idea to go ahead and open the Parameters palette. We'll come down here to Parameter's Dial, that opens up. Here are all those features, very specifically laid out, so that you can say, I definitely want the Focal Length of a standard 35 millimeter camera. That will change the view and how your camera responds. That's very important when you start working with possibly some other animation program for your matching camera data. So, that's camera movement in a nutshell. In our next movie we'll take a look at the animation controls in a little more detail, as well as take a look at the UI dots.