Welcome to Element 3D - Lightning Fast Animation in Element 3D - page 9

The statistics of your scene are in the upper-left section of the window. These include
the relative path of your model, number of models, number of vertices (points), faces
(polygons), and size of your object. The vertex and face statistics will be important
in terms of rendering. More of these means slower rendering times, fewer means
less quality. (We'll dive more into this in Chapter 8 , Optimizing Performance .)
Along the bottom of the Preview window are controls. With these controls (from left
to right), you can change the brightness of the preview, show the environment map,
change the lighting scheme, edit the background color, change the quality of your
textures, and show a grid. The Element 3D interface's screenshot shows these
options as set by default.
The Scene window
The Scene window allows the selection of objects and some property adjustments
(such as assigning objects to groups). Element 3D animates from within After Effects
(AEX), and group assignments will be important when we actually move on to
animate our scenes. Whatever is selected from within the Scene window will then alter
the Edit window to show you that object/material's properties for editing. Our capsule
is currently selected in the Element 3D interface's screenshot and assigned to group 1.
Toolbar (top)
The toolbar covers most of the major operations of Element 3D. The IMPORT button
is how you'll bring objects in from your 3D modeling software. UNDO and REDO
are self-explanatory, while RESET ALL resets all your edits to their default values.
EXTRUDE is used mostly for bringing in logos and text to be animated in 3D (you'll
extrude and bevel these, and we'll be covering this functionality later in this topic).
ENVIRONMENT changes the panoramic image assigned to your texturing maps
and reflections. Your standard HELP button is also there.
Clicking on the 3D STORE button will open a web browser to the Video Copilot
add-on store for Element 3D (where you can buy more packages, such as Jet Strike).
Clicking on the X button will make you lose all the changes that were made in the
interface. This is a cancel button. On the other hand, clicking on OK commits all
changes and pipes them into AEX.