Subtitles of the Movie

If you've never used a 3D application this is going to be very helpful for you because as we move around inside of the Poser Interface, particularly in our Viewport, you're going to have to know which way is up, left and right and in and out. That's the coordinate system that you'll find in Poser and the other 3D applications. The way it works in 3D, unlike an application like Photoshop or Flash, is that objects move up and down and left and right in most 2D applications. 3D applications, though, add a third dimension which is depth, which is near and far, so let's talk about exactly what letter corresponds to which direction. The first thing I'm going to do is on this model here of Andy I'm going to select the entire body so we can look at our parameters down here, and I'm going to also move this up a little bit as well. You'll notice, by the way, that in our Scale category in our Rotate category and in our Translation category we have Y, X and Z in front of all of these guys here. So what do these mean? Well, in 3D space X is the floor. X is left and right. So if we were to translate this figure along the X-axis we really moving him left and right. Notice as I scrub this dial here Andy moves on the X-axis. So think of X as the floor. Y is up and down. The best way to remember that is to think to yourself Y would you go up there? So, slide back and forth and you'll see that we can go up and down. You'll also notice, by the way, on all of these sliders, or parameter dials, you have negative and positives as well, so when I move Andy along the X-axis when we're going this way we're moving him in the negative X; and we're moving him on the positive when we get past the origin. The Origin point is 0,0,0 along the X-, Y- and Z-axes, so the Origin is literally the center of the 3D universe. So whenever you see zero that means the object is in the middle, or right in the Origin. Now if we move below this line here, this grid, which is the floor, we are moving Andy on the Y in the negative degree here and if I move him up we're going positive Y, we're going up. Z is depth. In and out. So if I move in the negative Andy goes away and if we go to the positive Andy gets closer to us. As we use Poser more and more you'll become more familiar with how this works. The good news is this is pretty much the same in any 3D application, so if you're working in Maya or LightWave or anything else you should be able to comfortably move everything in the same coordinate space: X, Y and Z.