Electric Image Animation System 7 Course

Welcome to the VTC course on Electric Image Animation System Version 7. My name is Scott Simmons. I'm the Animation Director at Live Wire Productions in Los Angeles. Electric Image, or EI for short, is a powerful 3D animation and rendering application. You've seen plenty of work done by EI artists on broadcast television and feature films. It is an ideal 3D solution for motion graphics and visual effects artists because of its ease of use and fast rendering. We've been using Electric Image for 16 years and it is an indispensable tool in our productions. EI is available for both Macintosh and Windows computers. I'll be using the Macintosh version of Electric Image in these lessons. The controls are almost identical in both versions of the program with the exception of using different keyboard modifiers like the Option key on the Mac where Alt is used on a Windows PC. 3D animation always impresses and captivates an audience and I've always found working in Electric Image to be rewarding and a lot of fun. It is also a fairly deep program, but I don't think you should be worried about the complexities of animating. In these lessons we'll focus on some basics that will get you going quickly and show off the power of Electric Image. During the course I'll focus on different parts of the Interface, or specific tools, and you will see a closer view of the Interface like this. Also, whenever I introduce a new keyboard shortcut, a graphic will appear like this to make sure you don't miss it. Before we get into EI itself, let's take a look at how its organized. Inside your computer's application, or program directory, find the EIAS7 folder. Click on that to see its contents. You'll see several applications and folders. Like most 3D programs, Electric Image is a system of applications and resources that are organized in such a way that they can all find and communicate to each other when needed. Be careful not to remove any of these items from this folder. Let's take a brief look at these items. There are six applications that make up the Electric Image Animation system. Animator, here, is where you do all of your scene setup in animation. Camera is the application that does the actual rendering of your projects. Let's jump down. Radiocity is a special program that calculates how light and color bounces from surface to surface in a very realistic way. It's a slow process and its results can be achieved in other ways from within Animator. The two Renderama applications are for distributing your rendering work over several computers or processors that really speeds things up, and Transporter is a model converter program. The rest of the folders contain libraries of materials and resources and preferences that Animator and Camera need to do their job. That's a quick overview of what's in the Electric Image system. When we spend more time in later lessons talking about these components, you now know where to find them. But the two core applications you'll be using the most are Animator and Camera. Again, Animator is used to create or set up your scenes, and Camera is used to render them. So, let's start exploring the features of Electric Image and launch Animator. Just double-click on its Icon and the Splash screen appears. Just click on the Splash screen to dismiss it. Then, let's travel up to the Menu bar and click File. We can start a new project or open an existing one. I want to open a project that I've already made, so I'll choose to Open Recent and select my project. Let's go.  

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