From the course: Introduction to Graphic Design - Dimension

Understanding 3D space

From the course: Introduction to Graphic Design - Dimension

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Understanding 3D space

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- [Instructor] As you can probably appreciate, working in 3D is a little different to the other applications you're probably familiar with such as Illustrator and InDesign, as their worlds are, not to put too fine point on it, flat. When you're working in 3D, you're actually looking into another world, and your view into that world is through an imaginary camera. You can turn the camera around to view different places in that world, but you're always fixed behind that camera in Dimension, and the camera is a single lens. So what you probably perceive here as being a square which it would be if we were in InDesign or Illustrator is actually a cube. And if I take it up above our eye level, of course, we're starting to see the base of that cube. We're also seeing a shadow here on the ground because just like our world, there has to be a point of illumination for us to see anything, okay, and if I bring this back down and don't worry by the way, we'll do all of this later on, you'll see that at some point I connect with the ground. And like our world we have an infinite ground plane underneath us. So it's very, very much like our own world, we're just viewing it a different way. If I move this over to the left here in this space, you can see that I'm now starting to see that cube's left-hand face just here, and similarly, if I move it over to the right, then I'm starting to see its right-hand side. I'll just bring it back just a little way here. So X and Y translation, that's how 3D people refer to moving things in space, so X is across, Y is up and down. Those things, you've probably already nailed those, but in 3D space, we have one other dimension to play with and that is the Z space. And that's the space between us looking through our camera and the distance. You can see here that if I bring this forward and forward and forward, it starts to go past our camera as it would if it were a vehicle, for example, going past, and if I go like this, it disappears into the distance and becomes smaller as a result. Okay, so it's not that difficult to get your head around really, it's just a bit strange after working in the flat 2D world of Illustrator, InDesign, and so on. But you'll get used to it, and in the next movie, we're going to take a look at this thing here, which is called the gizmo.

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