How To Use Virtual Decorator - Home Design Training Part 1

Learn how to use the Virtual Decorator Home Design Software. The video is the first part of the 2 part video based training.

Video Transcription

Okay. Let us get started. Now, the place to begin any virtual decorator is file open, and when we go file open. We are presented with a drop down dialog box. We need to go to super rooms here and you can see there is a series of thumbnails for six different super rooms. Now, what is a super room now you ask? Historically the Virtual Decorator software was template driven and what we mean by that is we made available to our users a large number of pre-built room templates that they could simply come in to the software, choose a room of about the right shape and the right size for the room that they wanted to design in, click on the thumbnail and a pre-built room of that exact shape and that size was made available to them. We did get a lot of feedback from our clients that said they wanted more control over the process of selecting the room they are going to build and they wanted to build different shape rooms, they wanted to build larger or perhaps smaller rooms, and so recently, the team to develop a 3D introduced the concept of the super room. And the idea behind the super room, now we only have six room templates. So, we have rooms that have different wall height. You can see here we have 24 100 millimeter high walls, 2700 millimeter high walls, 3 meter high walls, and for imperial uses, we have the same wall heights in 13 inches, and the way a super room works is best demonstrated. So, open up this 2400 millimeter high room, super room, I click once with my left hand mouse button on the thumbnail, and this opens the super room template. And you can see what we are presented is a grid and If I zoom in here, now we are going to talk about navigation in this training video so, do not worry too much about how moving around at the moment. We are presented with a grid of one meter, two scale blocks on this black background and on the grid, we have two walls, here and here that are fixed along this edge of the grid, and we have an additional two walls that are able to be moved, they are adjustable, and how we move these walls is we go to our move tool. Now, anytime you look at these icons, any icon in the software itself if you roll your mouse across it, you will see the little dialog box pops up and tells us what the tool is for, we go to the move tool, we click on the move tool by clicking once with our left hand mouse button and then we go and grab our red control cube here. Now, beware you cannot move these walls by grabbing the walls themselves. They do not move by themselves, you need to grab the control cube and once we have the control cube selected with their left hand mouse button held down. We can then slide our adjustable walls across these grid, creating a very, very large number of different room sizes. Now, this is all well and good for any user that wants to create a room that is a square room or a rectangular shape room of pretty much any shape and size and you could see we can create rooms of just one meter square up to massive rooms. For most residential projects, probably somewhere in the middle will be the size of the room that you require. If users want to create a room of more complexity, what we need to do is we need to introduce more walls. How we bring out additional walls in at the bottom middle of our screen is that icon that when we would roll our mouse across, it says display presentation layers. So, I click once with my left hand mouse button on this box and this presents us with a dialog box that says layers and this allows us to bring in additional control points. So, this is control point number one and you can see, I have that control point checked, so if I deselect this box, I lose those two adjustable walls, bring them back and I am going to bring some additional walls in control point one, two, three and four. If I zoom out, you can see I have now got additional sets of walls that I can use my move tool to grab again the red control cue and bring these control walls, or these adjustable walls into the room, into play and you could see by having additional control walls. What I can do is I can build a room literally of infinite shapes and sizes, so this is our room, inside this space here so I can move these adjustable walls anywhere I want into my scene and then when I have them in exactly the right spot, when I have created the room of the actual shape and size I require, I need to get rid of, I need to delete these red control points, now how do I do that. What I need to do is I need to go up to my color tool, again I use my mouse, I roll my mouse up here, it says color tool, I click once with my left hand mouse button to activate the icon and then I go to my control point and I use my color tool with the right hand mouse button held down, you would see I can slide through a transparency to opaque slider here. So, I simply click on the control cube with my rand hand mouse button held down and I go through a process of making each of these control points transparent, allowing me unobstructed access to my entire room. Now, for the purpose of this demonstration, I am going to delete these additional control points and we are going to work simply with a square or rectangular room so let us just basically move control point number one up to a point in my model and you can see, I have set this control point now on a grid that says one, two, three, four, five, six, seven meters, so this wall is then seven meters long and when I place myself inside this room, you can see I have a seven meter long wall. So, that is the idea of how we create a room, I am just going to delete the dialog box here, just click on the red close control and we have got our room. Now, once we have got our room into place. What we are going to want to do is get rid of our grid, we do not want to look at that grid when we are building our room. So, we can click on the grid and then go to our materials library up here in the top right hand corner of the screen, our number of icons. You could see this one that looks like a brick wall and one that is a blue square. The brick wall says browse textures and if I click on that I have a drop down dialog box, the whole bunch of different textures made available to me here. I am going to go up pick a pocket floors, I will choose a pocket three floor finish that is a right finish for my grid, right finish for my grid. Now, how I apply these textures to that surface is I click on the surface that I wish to apply the texture to, and then I choose the thumbnail, and with one click of my left hand mouse button, I apply that material to that surface. Okay. So, we basically put a flooring material into our room and now what we want to do is go through the process of applying some objects, bring in some objects into our scene. So, I click on the wall and I click on my objects browser here at the bottom left hand corner of the screen is a yellow cube shaped icon that says objects and I roll my mouse across the top of the icon, it says, display the object browser. One click with the left hand mouse button will open up the browser and you can see again, we have a drop down box with a large number of objects category choices for us. Let us go to paintings and I want to put a painting on this wall. So, in the same way that I click on the floor and then chose the material. I click on the area that I wish to apply the object, and then I click on the thumbnail for the object itself. And you can see what has happened to software is placed, that artwork and I can se my move tool just as I move my control point with my left hand mouse button, then I could now hold my left hand mouse button down and move my artwork on the wall. And you could see, when I have my move tool selected, I have four blue control points. One in each corner of my artwork. If I use my move tool, not on the artwork itself but on the control; point, I can effectively change the shape and the scale of this artwork. So, I can adjust that using my control points. Let us bring another object into my scene, get my objects library, this time I will scroll down to say doors and I will choose a door from my library of doors built into the software, got my move tool and move my door into position. So, that is the concept of applying objects to a surface like a wall. I click on the wall, I click on the object. Now, when I put some objects on the ground here.