How To Use Virtual Decorator - Home Design Training Part 1

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

Video Transcription

So, what I am actually going to do is now click on the floor and go to my objects browser again, slide down, it is a living area. Let us put a sofa or a couch in here, go down through my sofa styles, choose a style that I feel is appropriate for my space, and click on it and it introduces that object into my scene. Now, you can see this particular sofa is facing the wrong way. So, I need to use my rotate tool. So, I click on my rotate tool to activate it and then I click and hold my left hand mouse button down, and move my mouse across my mouse mat and this allows me to rotate my sofa into position. Now, moving objects into exactly the right position in a scene like these is very often the case of using a combination of move and rotate until you can nudge the object into exactly the position that you wanted to be in. Now, let us just put one more object into my scene, I am just going to move my door cross a little and I am going to place one more object into my scene. Let us go down to object browser again, this time I will go to living area, coffee tables and I will choose this coffee table. So again, the coffee table is sort of in the right place. I just need to move it, if I wanted to rotate that, I can simply grab the object and rotate that with my left hand mouse button held down. So, that is the overall concept of how you would place objects into a scene using the Virtual Decorator. Let us talk about colors now. In the icon next to the texture browser icon is a blue square shaped icon that if I click on it once with my left hand mouse button, I have a drop down dialog box that presents me with various paint manufacturers and the second box on that is the paint range. So, let us click on the paint range, click view chart and you can see I am presented with a large number of thumbnails here that have multiple pages for that particular manufacturer’s range of color charts. I want to put some color on the wall and then on the trim, so I click on the wall and then I will choose the color that I wish to apply to that surface. Now, I want to put some color on the trim so I click on the trim itself and then choose a color from the color charts. So, the process of applying color is exactly the same as the process of applying a material, you first select the surface that you wish to paint by clicking on it with the left hand mouse button and then you select the material that you wish to apply it or the color that you use to apply to that surface. Okay. Let’s talk about navigation, I have been moving round and jumping all over the scene here. Obviously, we need to understand how we can do that. Now, there are two forms of navigation in the Virtual Decorator software. The first form of navigation is what we call “Walk Mode” and we can access walk mode by clicking on the icon at the top left hand corner screen that looks like a little man walking and I click on here once with my left hand mouse button and this place is made to walk mode and when I am in walk mode, I can move around my model much the same way that you would move around a computer game. I press on the forward arrow key or the up arrow key to move forward. I press on the back or down arrow key to move backwards and I can use the mouse with the right hand mouse button held down as a camera control so I can steer or look around. Now, if I press forward and steer at the same time, I can move myself around the scene, again much the same as you would in a three dimensional computer game. Now, walk mode is certainly easy to learn to use and gives a great line of sight view of your finished model but there is a better way to move around when you are actually constructing the model and that was the mode that I was using when I was building and it is called view mode. Now, we access view mode by clicking on the view mode tool here at the top left hand corner of the screen, I click once with my left hand mouse button to put myself into view mode and then I can move around not just forwards, backwards left and right but I can move through all three dimensions in my virtual world. Now, view mode is a little trickier to learn that walk mode but is a very powerful and efficient way to move around a three dimensional scene, you can see I can use my right hand mouse button held down to push up and down. I can use my scroll wheel to move in and to move out and you could see I seem to be moving or pivoting around some sort of pivot point in this scene, right in the corner there. Where is the pivot point? That is the good news. You as the user get to set where the pivot point in any virtual decorator model is when you are in view mode and how you do it is very simple. If I want the pivot point to be the door. I simply move my mouse across the door and double click with the left hand mouse button twice and this resets the pivot point at that location. So, of I wanted to be the coffee table, I move my mouse to the coffee table and double click. And the coffee table then becomes the new focus on your pivot point. So, it is through a combination of choosing the right location to be the pivot point and then double clicking with my left hand mouse button held down. So, I can set exactly the right pivot point and then use my mouse with my right hand mouse button held down or my scroll wheel to zoom in and out. It is a very quick, efficient, and practical way to move around three dimensional model. As I said, it does take a little practice so my suggestion is you simply place yourself into view mode and practice setting your pivot point, double clicking on locations in the scene with our mouse, and then move the mouse around to the mouse mat. Just get in there and have some fun, you cannot break any thinking and very quickly you come to grips with how the view tool actually works. One last thing I want to cover in the training, and that is the concept of adding your own objects into a scene that are not provided with the library. And the reason we do this, there are hundreds and hundreds of objects included in the virtual decorator library but there are millions of choices made available to the consumer market today and the building industry. So, the expectation that we are going to have exactly the same products that you want to use in your house every time is simply not practical. So, let us talk about how you can take your digital camera, take photographs of the objects that you like and then bring them into the scene. So, what I did earlier as I took my digital camera out, I took some digital photographs of some doors from a door supply. Now, another great place that you can get digital imagery from is the web, the internet is an amazing place to get images, lots of why good supplies, people that sell things like stoves, and dishwashers, and kitchen appliances very often have great imagery of their products available on the website. I took my digital camera out, I took some photographs of some doors that are not included in our basic library. They are not included in the upgrade library. They are unique doors, they are unique to my building project so, I took some photographs of the doors and I placed them in a folder in the virtual decorator and this is explained in the instruction manual, the full version of tool called My Photos. It is the very top of the texture browser library. And these images that I am looking at now. These thumbnails, as I said are not included in the software, their digital photographs that I have taken with my digital camera. And I want to see what they all look like in my scene. Now, this could be really any two dimensional object, artwork, doors, stove tops, dishwashers, rugs, all sorts of amazing things that if you can get an image of it with a digital camera. You can bring in and you can put it into your virtual decorator model, and you can see what it looked like in combination with other color schemes and other materials. How we get your digital photographs into the scene is very simple? Let us put a door, let us use a default door here, we will click on the door, just as I will to move the door. And then we will go and click on this icon, you can see here, basically what that does is applies the digital photograph of my door to that surface. So, this is a digital photograph of a door that I quite liked, I took a picture of it, I put it in the photo called my photographs under program files, the virtual decorator, material, my photographs. And now, I can see what that door would look like in my scene in combination with all of the other design elements that I want to bring into my world. One of the most amazing and powerful features about that software is you can add your own objects and your own materials into the Virtual Decorator scene. So, that is a brief introduction to the overall concepts of the virtual decorator software. I hope you have enjoyed this video tutorial and I look forward to you downloading the virtual decorator software real soon. Thank you for your time.