Alice 3 provides an extensive gallery with hundreds of customizable 3D models that you can easily incorporate as actors. This article provides many tasks that will allow us to start making simple animations with many actors in the 3D environment provided by Alice.
We will search for models of specific animals in the diverse galleries. We will locate and orient the actors in the 3D space. We will give some simple orders to the actors to create simple animations.
In this recipe, we will create a new project and set a simple scene. Then we will browse the different packages included in Alice to search for a specific class. We will visualize the thumbnail icons that represent each package and class.
We have to be working on a project in order to be able to browse the galleries. Therefore, we will create a new project and set a simple scene. Follow these steps:
(Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.)
Follow these steps to browse the different packages included in Alice to search for a specific class:
Alice organizes its gallery in packages with hierarchical folders. The previously mentioned three packages are located in the gallery root folder. We can browse each package by clicking on its thumbnail. Each time we click on a thumbnail, the related sub-folder will open and Alice will display the thumbnails for the new sub-folders and the classes.
The thumbnail that represents a folder, known as a package, displays a folder icon at the upper-left corner and includes the preview of some of the classes that it includes. The next screenshot shows the thumbnails for three packages, amusementpark, animals, and beach. These packages are sub-folders of the Generic Alice Models package:
The thumbnails for classes don’t include the previously mentioned folder icon and they show a different background color. The next screenshot shows the thumbnails for three classes, Bird1, BirdBaby, and BlueBird:
The names for packages included within one of the three main packages use lowercase names, such as, aquarium, bedroom, and circus. The names for classes always start with an uppercase letter, such as, Monitor and Room. When a class name needs more than one word, it doesn’t use spaces to separate them but it mixes lowercase with uppercase to mark the difference between words, such as, CatClock and OldBed.
The main packages contain hundreds of classes organized in dozens of folders. Therefore, we might spend hours browsing the galleries to find an appropriate rabbit for our scene. We took advantage of Alice query features to search the entire gallery for all the classes that contain a string. This way, we could find a simple rabbit, Rabbit, and a dressed rabbit, WhiteRabbit.
While you type characters in the search entire gallery textbox, Alice will query all the packages and will display the results in real-time. You will notice that Alice changes the results displayed as you are editing the textbox. The results for your search will include both packages and classes that contain the entered string. For example, follow these steps:
If you think that Ladybug isn’t the appropriate bug you want as an actor, you can click on the thumbnail for the bugs package and you will find many other bugs. When you click on the thumbnail, the text you entered in the search entire gallery textbox will disappear because there is no filter being applied to the gallery and you are browsing the contents of the gallery Generic Alice Models | animals | bugs| package.
You can add a Beetle or a Catepillar, as shown in the following screenshot:
In this task, we will add a new actor to an existing scene. We will drag and drop a thumbnail of a class from the gallery and then we will learn how Alice adds a new instance to the scene.
We want to add a new actor to an existing scene. Therefore, we will use an existing project that has a simple scene.
Follow these steps to add a new instance of the WhiteRabbit class:
When we dropped the thumbnail for the WhiteRabbit class, the Declare Property dialog box provided information about what Alice was going to do, as shown in the following screenshot:
Alice defines a new class, MyWhiteRabbit, that extends WhiteRabbit. MyWhiteRabbit is a new value type for the project, a subclass of WhiteRabbit. The name for the new property that represents the new instance of MyWhiteRabbit is whiteRabbit. This means that you can access this new actor with the whiteRabbit name and that this property is available for scene. Because the starting camera view is looking at the horizon, we see the rabbit looking at the camera in the scene preview.
If you select TOP in the in the drop-down list located at the top of the big scene preview, you will see the rabbit on the grassy ground and how the camera is looking at the rabbit. The next screenshot shows the scene seen from the top and you can see the camera with a circle around it:
When you run the project, Alice shows a new window with the rendered scene, as seen by the previously shown camera, the starting camera. The default window size is very small. You can resize the Run window and Alice will use the new size to render the scene with a higher resolution. The next time you run the project, Alice will use the new size, as shown in the next screenshot that displays the dressed white rabbit with a forest in the background:
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