Day 2 - 3D Basics

GAME OF THE DAY:

http://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/cube/

QUESTIONS:

- What is the Social Metaphor of the game?

- Describe your experience playing the game.

- If you could, what would you change or add to this game?

For Today:

First off, lets recognize the basics of 3D:

The X-Y-Z coordinate plane:

X - is always on a horizontal plane

Y - is always on a vertical plane

Z - always represents depth (space)

Cinema 4D interface:

Primitives: 

Basic Geometric figures to get you started in building assets (Located in the "command palette")

Basic modeling tools:

Vertices/Points: where two points meet at an angle or a corner of a polygon. In Cinema 4D, you can push and pull these to manipulate your primitives.

Edges/lines: the line between two vertices

Faces/Polygons: What is created when you connect lines/edges and vertices.

Basic Movement tools:

Move: Moves your geometry on the X-Y-Z plane

Scale: Scales your geometry (i.e. makes it proportionally larger/smaller)

Rotate: Rotates your geometry

Material Managers:

Manages the textures that you can use to place on your models.

You can go to "Shader" and get a full menu of proprietary textures from the hard drive,

or go to "new material" and import your own textures from outside sources (i.e. web images)

After we get up to speed on all of this, lets try a quick 360 animation:

- Check out the Animation pallet; Notice that we are currently set up for 90 frames of animation.

- Place a new ball primitive on your canvas, and create a keyframe on frame 0 on your animation timeline, by hitting the "key" icon.

- Next, with your ball still selected, scrub to frame 90 and go to the attributes manager, then to r.b., and change the value from 0 to 360; now stamp a keyframe down by hitting the red outlined circle.