Strata Design 3D CX 6: the designers’ key to unlock 3D

Scene editing Tools

There is a collection of tools grouped here, which will allow you to light your scene and place your camera to establish your viewpoint.

Lighting

It’s the next logical grouping in the tool palette and also a logical next progression in advancing the scene. Without light there is no shape or form that can be rendered so it’s a very important group.

Strata Basically has three kinds of light that are actual light objects. Two of them are accessed from the tool palette and one of them is created via the Environment palette which is a separate window. The two that are accessed from the tool palette are the point light source and the spot light source. You create them by simply clicking in the stage area in case of the point light source. If you want to add a spotlight to your scene you can either click on the stage or you can click and drag to also define a first direction in which the spotlight is illuminating the scene. Both the point and spotlight have extended controls in the object properties panel. This is a very important information panel that gives you access to all of an object’s vital settings. These settings vary by the type of object you have selected.

The third type of light is a parallel light source that is one of the early light sources inherited from StrataVision and has never moved from its place. Now it is accessed via the environment tab. It’s a simple light source with parallel shadow casting and you can set only its strength. There are extra options however to add a gel (a kind of image map that allows you to throw colored light or a specific shadow pattern onto your scene. For the rest though it is the light with the least amount of control.

Camera

The camera tool is next in line in the tool palette. You might think that you have been working with a camera all this time but actually you have just been manipulating the viewport. To really have a camera in the scene with views that you can save out you need to draw a camera, which is just what this option will let you do. Simply click to add a camera to the scene or, like the spotlight counterpart, click and drag to create an initial direction. The nice thing is that when you drag the end point of the camera path to any object in your scene the camera will ‘lock’ on to that object and will always keep hat centered in view.

The camera view can be manipulated either by dragging the camera object around in your scene, or by looking directly through the camera view window and use the manipulation icons there to zoom in, zoom out, rotate left, right, top or bottom, pan left or right or pan up and down. You control the viewing angle via a slider with an eye icon on it. For the best control over your cameras’ settings there the object properties dialog box with a wealth of information on your camera object.

There you can also set which kind of camera you want. The choices being:

• Normal, for regular image and animation rendering.
• Panorama, for rendering QuickTime VR panoramic movies
• Stereoscopic, for rendering color
• Cubic, for rendering cubic environment maps
• Spherical, for rendering spherical environment maps

You can set a backdrop behind any camera window, which can aid you in placing shapes in a certain perspective that has to be matched from a photograph or live footage. I will show you later in this review how Strata and Photoshop will greatly ease this workflow with the use of the 3D grids inside of Photoshop.

Construction Guides

In this group you will find modeling and manipulation guides and grids that will help you place or edit geometry, lights and cameras. Being able to use a good guide system in a 3D space is essential to a good 3D workflow.

Guides

These are linear elements that that you can place along edges of shapes or objects. Once these guides are place you can either move objects along the direction of these guides in your scene or you can use them in edit mode to manipulate just portions of an object like edges, faces or vertices.

Grids

Grids are very important in that they enable you to exactly orient shape in relation to faces or planes of the model you are building. That may sound a little abstract so imagine the following: You have created a model of a house with a slanted roof. Now you would like to draw an object in the same orientation as the slanted roof. You can do this easily by first creating a grid that is oriented the same way as the roof if and each subsequent model is oriented exactly as your roof is.

View Manipulation

The final group consists of ways to manipulate the modeling view of your scene. Don’t confuse this with your self-created camera views because these don’t work with these icons.

You have a pan icon, zoom and a rotate icon which are basically the same controls as the ones you would get when you would press the spacebar with any key combination, just like you would in Photoshop or Illustrator. These controls are mainly for navigational purposes while you are doing your modeling, lighting and scene setup work.

This story written by Albert Kiefer

Albert Kiefer is a professional designer and technical expert located in the Netherlands. He has well over 20 years of experience in the fields of computer illustration, animation and image manipulation. He also develops interactive concepts and graphical interfaces for large international corporations that are active in consumer electronics.