Introductory Tour     by     Saul Greenberg When you first open tS5 ,this is what you will see.(1) Most graphics cards these days have the ability to display in D3D or OpenGL solid display modes. The scene will open in a solid display mode, most likely D3D. It contains a number of objects placed on a grid, that represents 3D space. By the transparent blue box around the Magician you can tell that he is the selected object. Go ahead and press the play button and watch the Caligari magician take a bow. Return the Animation to start. You will notice the Magician has a pale blue box surrounding him. This Selection Box indicates the figure is selected and ready for manipulation.  There are various ways to select an object in tS, try clicking on the head at the left of the screen.(2)The Magician is now de-selected and the head is ready for Work. Run your cursor over the selection box and you will see various parts of it light up, your cursor will also change at points to indicate different function. As you pass your cursor over the box, the title bar at the bottom of the screen will display messages telling you what that part does(3)       Try pulling on the selection box to see its effect, it takes some getting used to, but becomes an intuitive and easy way to manipulate objects.   Lets take a few moments to familiarize ourselves with the navigation controls. Bottom right in the interface is the view control widget.(4) Move your cursor over it and you will notice the different planes and rods light up yellow, showing when they are active. The different Functions of the view control, like every other tool in tS5, will be indicated in the title Bar at the bottom of the screen. Try pushing and pulling on the different surfaces. The rods rotate your view around an axis... The planes are used for moving thru the 3D space, the big green half-circle rotates around selected object. The gray sphere in the center can be used to move the View control around in the space, handy, because you can take it with you wherever you are working on the screen. Try moving it to the center of your workspace. Right clicking on gray sphere opens view control options. (5) Moving your cursor over each of the 4 icons will show its function in the title bar. Move your cursor over the arrow on left and it will start spinning, Left click and hold and a double arrow will appear, move your cursor over it and let go. This will change your View Control to fly mode. Click on the x on the far right to close the control properties. Now when using the big green half-circle (6) on the view control you don’t have to keep scrolling, a simple Left click,  nudge and hold will spin your view around the currently selected object. Give it a go, if you have changed nothing in the scene you will be rotating around the head. Let go of Left button to stop. At front of View control is Walk. (7) Left click give a slight nudge and you will fly thru your scene until you release the button.   All this playing with the view controls and object manipulation might have got you lost, you might even be upside down! Don't panic! Running up the left hand side of the screen are the Library buttons. Starting from Bottom they are: Project, Configuration, Scenes, Primitives, Objects, Color shaders, Materials, Lights, Paths and the image browser. Run your cursor over them and watch the title bar for description. Open the Scene Library. (8) You will notice that the opening scene-called tS5 Default-is already in the library. Click on it and up pops dialogue telling you that the scene has changed and asking if you want to save it. Say no and the scene will be returned to its state when you first started tS5. Lets go ahead and try making a scene of our own. Click on the file menu, then scene, then new and say no if the save scene dialogue pops up. (9) You have an empty scene but what are those strange dark lines in the center of the screen? Move your cursor over them and they will light up yellow. The title bar will tell you, they are lights. Lets change these.   On the library tool bar look for the lights library. Remember, watch the title bar as you move your cursor over the icons.(10) TS comes with many preset light setups to cover almost every situation. Hit the topmost set Colored lights and you will notice the original lights disappear and a new set loads. Lights are good but we need something to shine lights on, so lets find the Object library. (11) Choose an object, the tricycle for instance. Click on it and it will load into the workspace. You’ll see that the lights are centered around the cross made by the green and blue lines on the grid. The Trike has loaded slightly off center so lets move it to better see the effects of the lights. Find the axis tool on the bottom left tool bar. (12) By holding down the left mouse button on this icon a stack of tools will be revealed, continue to hold the left mouse button and slide the cursor up the stack until the title bar indicates you are over the Normalize Location tool. Release the left button and the trike will move to the center screen. The stacks are common to many icons on the tS5 tool bars. Another way to reveal them is to click the Handle on the end of the tool bars, (13) this opens all stacks on bottom level. There may be more. At the left end of the tool bar containing the axis tools are the primitive objects. Left clicking and holding on any of these will reveal a stack of further options. Now would be a good time to Save our scene so that we can return to this point if we mess up along the way.         Open the Scene library again and right click on an empty space.(14) Click on load and you will see that the current library, called scenes.scl, is loaded. Lets make a new library to hold our scene. Dismiss the load dialogue by clicking cancel. Right click on the scenes panel and choose new. An empty library is created. Right click on the scenes library again and pick insert. A small bitmap is created of your scene making it easy to find later.(15) Right click again and rename your library, lets call it "Trike". R click on the bitmap of your scene and rename your Item (scene) lets call it "Trike" as well.(16) Right click on the library one more time and hit load You will see that as well as the original scenes present when you first opened the library a new one has been added, Trike. Use the view control to make the trike and lights fill the screen. Use the walk part of the control with the left mouse button to move in and out of the scene. Try the Right mouse button with the same control to move the scene up and down. Try and make it resemble the picture on the right.  Remember that the scene is saved so you can easily return to the starting point by opening the scene library and clicking your saved scene.(17) Lets change the lighting parameters. Click on the far left light to select it and hit the L on the keyboard Up pop the Light properties (18) Use the slider to change the intensity of the light in  real time. Cool huh? You can also get this panel by right clicking on any of the lights in the scene. Move the color selector around the color cube to change light color. There are various other options in the Light panel that are covered in the manual and in other tutorials, but one control we should look at is the little red triangle next to the x top right. This is a control shared by many property panels in tS and expands the dialogue to reveal additional options. (19) Another control shared by much in tS5 is the right click.  The light properties panel, for instance, can also be opened, by right clicking the selected light. You can set your own short cuts for functions in tS5 and some are set by default, like the L key. I would recommend getting used to using keyboard shortcuts as soon as possible, it will make your tS5 experience much smoother. Lets try setting a shortcut-key. Place your cursor over the arrow on the bottom right toolbar.(20) Hold down the Ctrl key and then press F1.(21)    You will notice that Space is already set in one of the channels. This means that hitting the spacebar on the keyboard will select the object tool. Lets set a key to bring up the object properties panel. Check the right click box in the next channel down and press new Key. You can choose anything you want but its helpful to have something easily remembered. So lets make it the letter O. Now whenever you hit O on the keyboard up pops the Object properties panel.(22) Press it now. Lets look at another way to select objects. In the object properties panel you have just opened you will notice a name file with a downward facing arrow to its right. Click on the arrow and a list of all objects in the scene will open. Selecting in this list will select the object in the scene. In the case of the lights selecting one in the list and hitting L will open its properties.(23)  Which light is which though? From here you can rename your objects, so for instance, you  might name your lights by their color or function, backlight, fill, orange etc. Then selecting them and adjusting their properties is a breeze. You will also notice a red arrow similar to light properties panel, clicking on this expands the dialogue to enable you to set things like units of measurement and object render options. This is covered in more detail in the manual.     Lets try making a simple animation of our own. Find the Paths library.(24) Select the trike, if its not already selected and click on the circle in the Paths library. The path will load as an animation path for the trike, meaning the trike will move along the Path when you press the Play button. Press play on the animation toolbar. Oops, the trike is going backwards and it is not moving very realistically. Lets try making it follow the path in a more realistic fashion. We have a tool at our disposal that can help us do this, Its called the Look Ahead tool and its situated in the stack of the Path tool in the Animation toolbar. Press and hold down on the Path tool , slide your cursor to the Look ahead tool and release. Oops again, the trike has turned on its head. Lets try again. Open the scene library and click on our saved trike scene, say No in dialogue box when asked if you wish to save the scene and our scene will return to its original state. Use one of the selection methods we have discussed to make sure the trike is selected. First Let’s make sure our trike stays the right side up. Open a new small window by clicking on the New Left view button.(25) This view will open in a solid mode but to make it easier to see what we are doing lets change it to wireframe mode. Click and hold the solid icon in the bottom of the window and still holding down move your cursor up to the wire icon. (26) The trike is now shown in wire but it’s a long way off so lets zoom in on it. As with most things in tS5 there is more than one way to achieve this. One is using a tool you are already familiar with, the view control. Hold your cursor over the middle of the new window view control, right click and push the mouse away from you. The view will zoom in on the Trike. (27)  The other way to achieve a zoom is by using the Zoom tool on the small view tool bar furthest right. Click on the tool and push or pull on an empty part of the small view. Same effect.  Back to getting our trike the right way up.  Find and click on the axis tool,(28) its in the same stack as the normalize location tool we used earlier. We need to rotate the axis so the Z, which as you can see in the main view is currently facing up, is aligned facing forward.(29) This is because the look ahead tool assumes that "ahead" is along the Z axis. It doesn’t know that a trike faces a certain direction so we have to tell it.  To rotate the axis we’ll use another of tS default Key shortcuts, the X key. Press it now and move your cursor into an empty space of the small view. Right click and drag the cursor to the right. The axis will rotate left. Try and align the Y axis as vertical as possible. Click the axis tool again to hide the axis. (30)Close up the small view by clicking the x in the bottom tool bar. Now lets try applying our circle path again. Open the path library and click on the circle, find the look ahead tool again and click it, the trike will do a 180 degree spin. Remember it was going backwards? Now its facing the right way. click the play button again. Ahh now it looks better, the radius of the circle is a bit tight, so lets make it wider. In the stack with the Look Ahead tool is the Path tool,(31) click this now and press another of tS5 default key shortcuts, the C key. Place your cursor in an empty part of the screen, hold down both the Left and Right mouse buttons and drag right. The path will increase its radius. Press play again, that’s better, right click the play button and put an x in the box next to "Loop". Now the trike will ride forever, until you press ESC on the keyboard.(32) To demonstrate the effectiveness of naming your scene and of Key short cuts hit Ctrl-A. The save scene dialogue pops up and with a name already loaded ,trike0. Yes tS5 automatically adds a number to your scene name, press enter and a new bitmap of your scene is loaded into the scene library. Let’s render this animation we’ve done to an AVI file. Close the small left view if it’s still open, you won’t be needing it anymore. Move the view so that tricycle fills up the view, but so that it never travels out of frame during the animation. Now click on "Render Scene to File".(33) You will see a large panel appear called "Render to File". Click on the down arrow next to "Save as type" and select AVI from the drop-down menu. Under "Resolution", click the second radio button from the top, and select "320x200" from this drop-down menu. Under "Effects" make sure that "Motion Blur" is turned off (you might want to play with this feature later) and "field rendering" is set to "None". Under "Animation" click on the radio button next to "All Frames 0-40" and the rest you can leave alone for now. Type a name for your animation in the "File Name" box, like "Trike.avi" and save it to a folder that is easy for you to find. You will now get a box called "AVI Compression". Take a look at the items in the drop-down list. These are all of the Codecs that trueSpace5 has detected on your computer. What’s a Codec? Codec stands for "Code, Decode". They keep the animations you make from being huge in file size, and make it so that you can view animations made with a certain Codec. DivX is a really nice Codec that is gaining in popularity on the web. If I were to make an animation with the DivX Codec, and you don’t have DivX, then you wouldn’t be able to view the animation I made. Scroll to the bottom of the list of Codecs. "Full Frames (Uncompressed)" means that there is no Codec used. Any one could play it, but the file size will be pretty large. You will want to experiment with the different Codecs on your computer later on, but for now just choose "Full Frames (Uncompressed)" and hit ok. You will see each frame of animation render out, and when it’s done, you can look in the folder you saved it into and play the AVI. Your animation should look something like this. if you don't have the DivX Codec, you can download it from here. You have just made a 3D animation! I hope you have enjoyed and learned a lot from this tutorial. We've only scratched the surface of what truespace can do, but this should give you a good jumping off point. So have fun with it!    © Copyright 2001, Saul Greenberg  Tutorials Index