Carrara Basics

 

Welcome to the 3-D world! We'll get a feel for this by experimenting in class. The material in this web documentation is just a supplement. As in the class, you need to learn this new environment by experimenting. Inside Cararra, pull down under Help to Quick Tour ... and spend a few minutes exploring this world.

This program is a 3-D drawing program. It has a quite different look from a 2-D drawing program. The screen objects look different. Load Carrara by clicking on the box with a letter C on the dock. It normally loads in Full Screen Mode (you can pull down under Windows to change this). It will normally give you a 3-D single window view of any scene. To see what this means, you'll need to create your own file and put something in it. To get started, if you pull down under File to New, you will see a dialog box similar to that shown to the right. Click the button circled in red for creating a new Empty Doc to start a new file. You will see what a new "blank" scene (file) looks like in Carrara. To get started, add a sphere by clicking the button circled in red below and then clicking in the middle of the scene grid. This screen has a lot to describe. See the text below for some introduction.

The sphere (or any other new object, or selected object) appears with 3 arrows sticking out and a bounding box outlined. Think of the grid structure as showing 3 walls below, and behind left and behind right. The sphere button (circled in red above) is the left end of a row of objects you can add to your scene. So these buttons are called the Object Primitive Tools. Some, like the Sphere, actually have several objects on the same button. If you hold down the mouse button on this, a menu of different objects appears (cone, clinder, rectangular box, etc.).

The pointer tool (Carrara calls it the Move tool) is circled in blue above. It is at the top of a column of tools down the left side of the scene. For us, the most important ones are the first 3, Move, Scale, and Rotate. We'll practice with each of them in class. For each, click the tool on and then click an object and then drag on a bounding outline. (For Rotate, try it on something other than a sphere.) For Scale, hold the Shift key down for simultaneous proportional scaling in all three dimensions. Note that this is similar to proportional scaling in other programs.)

In yellow above, are indicated different icons to take you to different "Rooms" in Carrara. The first, indicated with the Hand is the Assembly Room. Here is where you start. You add objects, move, scale, and rotate them. The next room is called the Model Room. We'll use it to set the characteristics of any single object. For example, we'll put some text in our scene and use the Model Room to pick a font and set other text characteristics. The Pencil icon is for the Storyboard Room. We won't use it in this course. Next, with a brush icon is the Texture Room. Swe'll use this to put surfaces and colors and textures on objects. The last (with a filmstrip icon) is the Render Room. Below you will find information about using this to create your final output images or movies.

In green above we circle a button on the right edge of the assembly window for opening up a Properties window. This is very much like the Properties window in Dreamweaver. As you click on different objects, the properties will show for your chosen object. You can modify them there. You might notice a similar icon on the bottom of the window. That opens the Sequencer where we'll build animations.

Over on the far right side of your scene, you'll see a column of icons like those pictures at right. (They were trimmed out of the above.) These ared buttons that affect your view of the scene. In 3-D work, you will often want to see your objects from different perpectives. Ther most important of these is the 4th one down. Click it. It gives you 4 views of the scene you are working with (Top, Right, Front, and Camera). You place and edit objects in the environment by working in any one of these windows. In the example above, your sphere was placed in the camera view and is now visible from Top, Front, and Right Views. Try the other buttons. Notice how if you move your sphere in any one view, it updates in all the other views. In the single view (top buton), look in the upper left part of the scene. You should see text that says "Camera 1." This is a pop-up. Try it. You can choose any perspective to view uyou scene. The lower three buttons control whether the grid planes are visible. Try them.

A Basic Tutorial - Create an Animation

So lets go soup to nuts with a little project. It is what you will do with your last homework. We'll use the ide3as above and introduc a few new ideas.

1) Start up Carrara and use File -> Close if anything is open and then do File -> New and (just as above), click New Emptry Doc. You're ready to build something new now.

2) Lets add a text object. For this, use the 4th icon accross the top. It has the letter T on it. Clcik the button and then move the cursor into the middle of hte scene and click. Suddenly, you are in the Model Room working on an object - your text. Choose a font on the left and type a word or so -- lile "Hello World!" Then click the Hand to switch back to the Assembly Room.

3) Now lets get ready to animate the text. Click the button at the bottom of the screen to open (or lift up) the Sequencer window(yellow below). This is a timeline like Avid. As with Avid, you'll insert keyframes and at each keyframe you'll move or rotate or scale your text differently. The program will create an animation of smooth frames from one keyframe to the next. This is so easy! See the Current Time Indicator (CTI). It is a triangle (in red circle) starting at the left edge of the timeline. You can drag it on hte line and see the time in sweconds and frames on the left of the orange circle below. The right of the orange circle shows that the computer defaults to a 5 second animation. You can change that to what you want. For now, leave it.

4. To animate, slide the CTI triangle to the right to 1 second and 0 frames (00:01:00). Click the rotate tool and rotate your text some (in any direction -- you'll get the idea. Then set this to be a keyframe by clicking the button (in green circle) that looks like a key. All the buttons in the green circle are about keyframes. If you click the left triangle, the CTI will jump to time 0. If you click the triangle on the right next, the CTI will jump back to the keyframe you just defined (at 1 second in). Now drag the CTI to time 2 seconds and 0 frames. use the move tool to move your text. Then click the key to create a new keyframe. Then move to time 3 secondes and Scale your text smaller and rotate it and move it. Then click the key again. Notice how easy this is. To play your animation, use the buttons to the left of the keyframe buttons. You'll see a Play and a Stop button etc. You now have animated 3-D text.

5. Now we need to render the animation. To rendfer means to actually calculate the individual frames of a scene. These will be stored in a movie file that can be put on the web. To start, click on the Render Room button (like a piece of film) in the upper right of the screen. Then open the properties window on the right side to set some parameters about your animation rendering. In the Properties window, you'll see 3 tabs (called Rendering, Output, and Progress/Stats). The first two have settings to make. The third tells you progress as you Render. They look like the image below. We've circled in red the settings you should make/check. Photorealistic is the normal type of rendering you will do. The alternative is somthing like an impressionist painting. We've left Raytracing off to speed up the process. (More later about Raytracing.) Set Antialiasing to Fast or Good or Best (more about antialiasing below). In the Output tab, set your size to 240x180 to keep the file size small. Near hte bottom, set the frame rate to around 12 fps. Anything 15 or below is usually OK. Anything above that will choke on some computers. Now, render --- by hitting Apple - R. Watch the Progress window.

6) You now have a finished movie ready for the web. Below we'll describe variations you can (and should) do. The main ones now are to contol the movie filename and location and to compress your movie file so its not huge. See the sections below included under Rendering.

Rendering

Controlling Filename and Location for your Movie
At the bottom of the Output Tab, there is an iten called File name. Note the setting starts out on Default name. Click the button for "In Named File:" and name your file and put it in your web folder and then re-render (Apple - R).

Compressing your Movie

If you don't adjust settings, the movie won't be compressed at all. There are many compression systems (called CoDecs - for Compression/Decompression algorithms) available in Carrara (and most systems that can create web movies). We suggest you use MPEG-4. It is high quality with fairly small files. So in the Output tab above, see the Section called File Format. Under QuickTime Movie, it has a button called Options. Click it and make settings like the dialog like that shown at right for your movie. We talked in class about key frames. If every 24th frome is a key frame, then the computer sends one full frame and then just small cells for the next 23 frames where there has been a change in that cell. Then a full frame is sent and the process repeats. This process helps a great deal to shrink the resulting file.

Antialiasing
Above we enterred a setting for antialiasing. What is that about? Antialiasing is a technique for smoothing the jagged edges of an object. The image below shows a cube. On the left is the image without antialiasing. The right side image was done with Best antialiasing.

The following sequence shows how this is done. The left edge of the above cube was enlarged by a factor of 4. It was rendered with antialiasing set at None, Fast, Good, and Best from left to right.

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