This section describes the location of the installation files, how to start Viz Artist and logging on to a Graphic Hub, and how to close Viz Artist.

This section contains information on the following topics:

• Viz Artist Startup and Close
• Viz Artist Folders
• Viz Artist Command Line Options

General Concepts of Viz Artist

The User Interface of Viz Artist has been designed to achieve the best experience while creating and designing stunning graphics. A modern dark themed User Interface helps you to focus on your work while offering a flexible docking system to customize your workspace.

Working in Viz Artist is based on Drag and Drop concept, almost every item can be dragged to different locations, for example to the trash bin to delete items.

Active Items are marked with a blue border and a darker background:

Items that are not available (for example, not supported in the current render pipeline) are greyed out and cannot be used.

Reset and Undo/Redo

Any action can be reverted and redone by using the Undo and Redo () buttons on the bottom of the Scene Tree dock.

All steps are shown in the Undo/Redo stack dock. Click on any entry to roll back or forward to the selected action:

Default Values

Any value that differs from its default setting is marked with a blue label. To revert back to the default value, double click on this blue label. This also works on groups of parameters.

Example

The value of 141.0 of the X position is set to the default value of 0.0 by double clicking on the blue X. By clicking on Position, all three values of X, Y and Z are reset to their default values.

Values used in different formats, mainly used for adaptive scene designs are marked with an underline:

Drag and Drop

Items can be assigned by dragging them from various pools (for example, plug-ins) to their respective destinations.

Example

The position property can be taken and dragged to another container. This means that all X, Y and Z position properties of the source container are applied to the target container.

When dragging a property to the Control Channels panel, this property can be access from control applications.

Some icons like images, containers can be deleted by dragging them to trash bin: .

To Change Values

Values can be changed in various ways. They can be entered manually and you can even perform calculations in there:

The mouse can be used to drag values. There are some modifiers to change the precision of your value:

Timecodes

When dealing with time based values, Viz Artist version 5.1 and later offer the possibility to change between timecode view and the classic absolute view. The classic absolute view depends on what the user has chosen to work with (Seconds, Frames or Fields). Depending on the output format (interlaced or progressive) the default timecode and step size are displayed in fields or frames. 

To change, click the format switcher:

Conflicting Values

When using multi-selection, Viz Artist indicates conflicting values in spinboxes with a hyphen (-) character. A value is conflicting if the value is different in the individual selected elements and no common value can be displayed.