CS465 Modeler: A brief user's manual

This section briefly outlines the use of the framework, from the user's perspective.

Menus

Tree View pane

The tree view shows the structure of the scene that is displayed in the viewports. It is here to help you understand that structure and to make it possible to select intermediate transformation nodes (which can't be selected by clicking on objects in the viewports). You can rename nodes just by editing the text in the tree pane. The tree pane has a contextual menu (right button menu) that duplicates many commands from the Edit and Scene menus. It has one additional command: Note that the commands on the contextual menu apply to the current selection, not necessarily to the node you right-clicked on.

Property pane

The contents of this pane depend on the selected node.

Viewports

The three orthographic and one perspective viewports all show you rendered views of the 3D scene. The same types of controls work in all four; the only difference is that the orthographic views use parallel viewing and have their view directions constrained to $-y$ (top), $-z$ (front), and $-x$ (side). It is not possible to get bottom, back, or left side views from the orthographic viewports. You can enlarge one of the viewports to fill the whole viewport pane by double clicking with the left mouse button. The four cameras are linked. The orthographic views are centered on the target point of the perspective camera; this means the orthographic views all share a center, and you can shift the perspective camera around by panning in the orthgraphic view. The orthographic views all have the same magnification (image height); this means that when you zoom in and out in one orthographic view it affects all three. The controls for moving the camera are as follows: Clicking with the left button generally selects the object clicked on. Shift-clicking extends the selection to multiple objects, and clicking on the background deselects everything. Multiple selections are mainly for grouping; manipulators apply to the first object selected only. To manipulate several objects together, group them and select the group's transformation. Selecting an object actually selects the transformation just above it; this is normally what you want in order to manipulate it. But if you have created a tree where some objects do not have their own transformation, editing this transformation may affect other objects. Look at the tree view to understand what is selected. The operation of the manipulators is described in the handout. You can still select objects when the manipulator is displayed.

Spline editor

The spline editor displays a single chain of Bézier segments, with the control polygon in blue. Normal control points are shown as diamonds, and corner points are shown as squares. The editing controls are as follows: Cornell CS465 Fall 2005 (cs465-staff-l@cs.cornell.edu)