3D Canvas LP / DarkBASIC Pro Tutorial

The image on the lower left side of the screen is the navigation control.  It allows you to change your viewing perspective so that you can be at a better vantage point to look at your model as you are creating it.

The red arrow is the X-Axis.  Green is the Y-Axis and blue is the Z-Axis.  Clicking your mouse on any one of those axes changes the cursor to a '+' sign and moving the mouse  will rotate the scene about that axis. Furthermore if you click and drag your mouse in any of the shaded areas (planes) adjacent to the axes you will move the scene along that plane. Try clicking and dragging in each of the axes and shaded areas to see what effect it has on the scene.

We are now going to apply a picture (often called a texture) to your sphere.

To do this we need to open the Material Palette tab to design a "material".

Click on the Material Palette tab on the left of the screen.

Click on one of the pictures (textures) in the Texture Library.

On the right hand side of the screen is the edit toolbar.  Click on the fill tool in the toolbar.

Now click on the sphere to apply the texture to it.

The animation toolbar should appear on the bottom of the screen.

Click on the Animate button to enable the toolbar.

Now select your sphere. Notice that when you do so an icon appears on the lower right side of the screen. This is the edit control and is only enabled or visible when an object in the scene (e.g. your sphere) is selected. The edit control is used to change the position, size, and orientation of your selected object.

Now try clicking and dragging on the axes and the shaded planes to see what effect this has on your sphere. Try clicking and dragging in each of the separate areas in the shaded plane to see its effect on the sphere.

Now increment the animation time to 3.00 and click on the repeat animation button

This creates a loop in your animation so that the sphere will go back to the position of keyframe 0 at the end of the animation sequence.

Rem Project: project_one
Rem Created: 7/29/2003 9:22:13 PM

Rem ***** Main Source File *****


remstart
This program shows the basic commands and how to manipulate your animated sphere based on input from the keyboard.
Don't worry if you don't understand how it works, just copy, paste this code into darkbasic program and play around
with it.  Go to the help menu and click on Index.  If you want to know for example what each each command and each
parameter means type in 'set object speed' in the text field and click on the link to view description of the
command.  Do that with 'loop object','move object', 'move object left', 'sync', 'point camera', 'position object'.
remend


`also notice the three ways of commenting code: rem or ` to comment single lines, or remstart and remend for commenting blocks of text..

rem first we load the object into our program

load object "sphere.x",1

   do
      loop object 1
      set object speed 1, 15
      x = object position x(1)
      y = object position y(1)
      z = object position z(1)

      print "x: "; x
      print "y: "; y
      print "z: "; z

      if inkey$()="w" then move object 1,.1
      if inkey$()="s" then move object 1,-.1
      if inkey$()="a" then move object left 1,.1
      if inkey$()="d" then move object right 1,.1

      if upkey()=1 then move object 1,.5
      if downkey()=1 then move object 1,-.5
      if leftkey()=1 then yrotate object 1, wrapvalue(object angle y(1)-.5)
      if rightkey()=1 then yrotate object 1,wrapvalue(object angle y(1)+.5)

      while spacekey()=1
          position object 1,0,0,0
          point camera 0,0,0
          sync
      endwhile

   loop
sync

load object "sphere.x", 1
loop object 1
suspend for key
end