The next row down is the Toolbar which contains various icons for the tools. As you can see, the second icon, the Sphere icon, has a drop-down menu indicated by the small triangle next to the icon. Click on the triangle to expand the menu and there are eight icons in the list. Each icon represents one of the eight geometric primitives. Besides the Sphere, we have a Cube, Cone, Cylinder, Icosahedron, Plane, Infinite Plane and Splat. You will be using these geometric primitives quite often to build objects for your scene. For example, you would start with a sphere to make an apple. These are called "primitives" because the geometry to create and render these objects is simple and requires a small amount of your computer's resources.

A rule-of-thumb in 3D modeling is to use the least amount of geometry as possible to create objects for your scene. As you add more and more objects to your scene, the scene's geometry increases. Very complex scenes can take several hours to render. Therefore, you will always follow this rule when building a scene. Let's place a Sphere in our scene. The menu should already have the Sphere icon as the active tool. Place your mouse cursor in the center of the scene and click once. Magic!

Let's continue exploring. Down the left side of the window, you will first see the Transform tools which are the Move, Scale, Rotate and Universal Manipulator. Under those are the Eyedropper and Create IK Chain tools. Next, we have the Camera tools including the YZ Track, XY Track, XZ Track and Dolly. Then, we have the Test Render, Pan and Zoom tools. The Test Render tool works like a special type of selection tool. When you click and drag to selected an area of the scene, that part of the scene is test rendered. Click on this icon and then draw a rectangle selection around the sphere in your scene. Magic again! Why is the render so dim? Well, we haven't added our lighting to our scene yet.

At the bottom, you can toggle between the Sequencer/Timeline for creating animations and the Browser where you can browse through the many assets that came package with Carrara and any of your own assets that you have saved. You will find many presets including skys, landscapes, indoor spaces, lighting, product packaging and animations. Across the top of the Browser are category tabs for Scenes, Objects (plants, leaves, hair), Shaders (glass, metal, wood), Clip, Misc, Artwork and Content. Finally, down the right side of the UI is the two-part Properties Tray which contains all the information about any object in your scene. We will be exploring these in more detail in the next few tutorials.

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Images used with permission from DAZ Productions, Inc. Bryce, Carrara, DAZ|Studio, Hexagon, and Mimic are trademarks, or registered trademarks of DAZ Productions, Inc. Visit www.daz3d.com for more information.