I've decided to start up this tutorial thread to help out the community for a couple reasons, it may help cut out some of the How Do I questions, it may actually be a great thing for the community if it becomes on going, and final, it will help myself progress even further. I do not plan to keep this thread geared to any one application but to a varity of applications. And also If someone has a tutorial they would like to add in, go for it.
Sinse I've never writen A tutorial before I decided to start out with a tutorial on setting up a scene in truespace..I know many people here already know how to do that...but for those who don't....here it is
Tutorial #1 - setting up a scene in Truespace.....
Setting up a scene in Truespace.
For my first tutorial I am going to assume that this is the first time we've ever opened Truespace. If you have used Truespace before than this tutorial may not be for you.
When we first open Truespace It will open up in the WORKSPACE VIEW, (in the image provided, It is the small screen marked with the #1). The First thing you want to do is get into the model view, in the yellow box you see 6 tabs. For now just left click on the trueSpace6 tab. This will bring up the model view that we will be doing all our modeling in.
In the green box you see a toolbar filled with icons and of course these toolbars are lined around your screen. Each toolbar contains its own set of functions, this one for example is for object manipulation such as move, rotate and scale. Boxed in red is the toolbar handle, left click to expand, minimize, or hide the toolbar. By expanding the toolbar you can see the full list of functions that the toolbar contains. of coarse each list is made up of more icons instead of a menu.
On the bottom left or your screen outlined in the white box, is the primatives list, rather than to expand the toolbar to see the full list for the whole toolbar, you can just LEFT CLICK AND HOLD your cursor over the icon. This will expand the list of functions that belong to that particular group. While holding down the left mouse button or LMB, drag your cursor to the function icon that you would like to use than release to select it.
In this case we will select the plain which is the icon shown in the small white box.
Once you have the plain selected just LClick any where in the 3d view to create it. Keep in mind that the more you left click the more plains or objects will be created. So If you only want one object, as soon as you create it, you can either right click on it to go into edit mode or click on the white arrow to the bottom right of your screen (outlined in blue) to go into object mode.
In Pic #2 you can see that I have created 4 plains, From here we need to add our reference pics.
LClick on the material icon shown in the Yellow box. this will bring up the material editor. once this is up we need to get out textures.
browse for your textures by LClicking on the icon shown in the Green box to bring up the browser, from there click on the folder shown in the blue box then browse the dir to the folder where you have your pics and select ok to load your pics in the browser.
once their loaded, left click and hold your cursor over the backview and drag it over the material ball as shown in the pic and release to load it to your material editor.
Again left click, hold and drag but this time from the material ball to the plain.
Repeat these steps for each plain.
Once you have all the textures loaded onto the plains, LCick on the arrow shown in the red box to expand the material editor, then click the red X in the darkblue box to clear the texture from the material editor and close the editor by clicking on the black x of coarse.
Now that we have our plains textured, we can rotate them and start to set up the scene.
At the top right of your screen set the screen to 4 views by left clicking and selecting the 4 view icon as shown in the darkblue box.
course you can see I already did that.
Next by left clicking, select the front view plain from the 3d or top view. Right click on the white arrow, bottom right boxed in red to bring up the object info dialog.
In the 3d view with the front view plain selected, we see a frame with rotation rollers on it (circled in yellow). As you may have noticed, when you move your cursor over the different parts of the frame and the rollers, they highlight in yellow.
With your cursor, highlight the rollar that appears to be at the rooftop of the front view plain, left click, hold and drag your mouse so that the view of the truck is upright.
As your rotating the plain keep an eye on the object info to see what axis is being manipulated and finish by entering the final value (Usually to the nearest + or - 90 , 180 degrees).
In the pic shown the final rotation will be -90 degrees on the X axis.
I say start your rotations by using the rollers rather than just entering values, the rotation can become very confusing otherwise.
You can set the image to the center of your workarea by setting the X and Y Location values to 0.
Play with the rollers and the rotation values abit to get the feel for it. By setting the location values to 0 and playing with the rotation rollers, you should be able to gain a good enough idea how to set the rest of the rotation yourself.
The 4 Icons that mark the center of the four views each represent the view you are looking at. use your cursor left click and scroll to see the different views and adjust your scene accordingly.
In the TOP view your truck or front of your object should be facing downwards.
Now with all the plains centered and rotated it's time too adjust the plains so that each view of our truck matches in height....
With the texture browser up, hover your cursor over the side view pic of the truck. after hovering for a moment a tag appears given you type of pic and dimensions, My side view pic is 1071x364 pixels.
Now darkbasic, and truespace both use the same sizing system. 1 unit= 1 meter, When we create a cube in truespace, the default size of the cube is 2 units or 2 meters.... So with that said, if we set the size to 1071x364 it is going to be well to big to work with, so instead set the X/Y values to 10.71x 3.64 this will keep our project at a workable size.
After you have the side view scaled to size go ahead and do the same with the other views.
Once your done you'll notice that they are not all the right size in comparison to the side view. that's ok! select the front view plain, using the frame around the plain you can move or scale the plain. to move them you simply hover and highlight the center of the frame then click and drag to move it(in the pic I used green with arrows to show this), TO scale hover over the very corners of the frame and wait for the icon to appear with 3 arrows again click and drag to scale (i used pink to show this).
be careful though when you scale, you'll want to scale when you have 3 arrows showing, not 2 arrows. also make sure the wheels are all alined to the horizontal plain to be most accurate when sizing the other pics.
and that's it. just grab and move the plains away from the center of the workspace but make sure you move them straight back and not move them out of alignment to the other pics.
this last part is simple, in the ts6 files tab, open the display options. you can click and drag to adjust the lights direction with the 3d arrows you see in the center of your workspace, in the light blue box (bottom left) drag the shade slider to brighten your area, In the display options dialog click and hold on the light and select the light with the red x to hide the light arrows in your workspace. that's it all done...
