1. Welcome to the first in a series of tutorials for World Construction Set 6. Our goal here is to get you started with WCS, so let's create our first project. When you launch WCS the opening splash screen will give way to an informational window where you can check Tips, Projects, and Tutorials.

2. Clicking the Tutorials button will open the list of Available Tutorials, each with a description and project thumbnail. Double-clicking the tutorial description or clicking the thumbnail will open it in your internet browser. The Resume button in the lower left corner of the window will open the last project you were working on last time you were in World Construction Set. Since this is our first project, Resume just closes the opening window and leaves WCS ready for a project.

3. Let's create a new project. Go to the menu and select File > New, or use the Ctrl+N keyboard shortcut.

4. This will open the New Project window. In the New Project field, enter the project name. Let's call our's Island to create the project file and a folder to save it in. All the projects demonstrated in these tutorials can be found in the WCSProjects\Tutorials folder if you'd like to use them later. Click Create & Save to save the new project.

6. We'd like to import some terrain data for this project, so when the Import Data question box opens, answer Yes.

7. The terrain data we're looking for is on the Tutorials 1 CD, so make your way to it and open the dem folder. Here you'll find the island.elev file, which is a WCS terrain elevation file.

8. Open the file to launch the Import Wizard, which will correctly identify it as a WCS DEM. A DEM is a Digital Elevation Model, and is a generic term applied to just about all terrain data files.

9. What kind of files can you import? Like anything else in WCS, it's easy to find out by using the F1 key to jump to the appropriate section of the Interactive Reference Manual. For data types, scroll down the Import Wizard page to the DEM Formats section.

10. Meanwhile, back in WCS, the Import Wizard is still waiting for us. The data file has been correctly identified as a WCS DEM, so click Next to the LOAD AS window.

11. We'll go with the Wizard's loading suggestion and continue on to the Next OUTPUT FILE TYPE AND NAME window. Here we can change the format and name of the file, but let's keep what we have.

12. Click Next to the DATA POSITIONING window and select Import.

13. As the data is imported, you'll see action going on in the Status window at the right end of the Animation Toolbar. The Import Wizard will close once data import is complete.

14. You'll notice that once the data was loaded, some of the categories in the Scene-At-A-Glance changed to a bold font. The Scene-At-A-Glance is divided into an upper and lower pane along the left side of your screen. It gives you convenient access to all Components, the building blocks of your scene. With each new project, basic default Components are created, represented by bold categories in the Scene-At-A-Glance. We'll look more at the Scene-At-A-Glance when we start working with Task Modes in our project.

15. So where's the terrain we just imported? Our Matrix, the gray area taking up most of the screen, is empty until we tell WCS what to put in it. By default, the Matrix is divided into 4 quadrants, convenient for Camera views and Component Editors.

16. To change the Matrix layout, open the Preferences window from the Icon Toolbar or use the Ctrl+P keyboard shortcut.

17. The Matrix page allows you to choose one of 12 layouts. The 4-quad layout works fine for me so I'll stay with it.

18. While we're here, let's look at the Paths page. When you see WCSProjects:, WCSContent:, and WCSFrames: elsewhere in the program, these are only aliases. Paths are the actual folder locations. Read more about them in the written manual; they come in handy when you're running and rendering WCS across a network.

19. The Units page gives you convenient access to all unit settings so you can match them to your project requirements.

20. Let's take a look at the Cameras WCS has created for our new project. Right-click in the upper left Matrix cell to open its popup menu, or Option+click on the Mac, and hold your mouse pointer over the View item. The 3 Cameras with the project name are the Cameras WCS created for the project.

21. Select the Island Camera, which will be our main Camera for this project. The Camera is at its default location midway along the southern border of our terrain.

22. Right-click in the upper right Matrix cell to open its popup menu and select the Island Planimetric Camera. A planimetric camera looks down on terrain that has been flattened like a map.

23. Alt+click the red icon with triangular wings directly below us to make it the active item (Command+click on the Mac). The icon turns yellow and its name, Island Overhead (Camera), shows up in the Active Item window on the Animation Toolbar.

24. Alt+click the other Camera icon at the bottom of the Planimetric view and you'll find it's the Island Camera, the one we have open to the left.

25. Let's increase the terrain detail in our realtime Camera views. Right-click a Camera view title bar to open the popup menu (Option+click on a Mac) and select Open View Preferences.

26. Most of the parameters are specific to the Camera view we opened the window from, in this case the Island Planimetric. An exception is the All Views section of the General page. The Max Polygon value controls the number of polygons drawn in realtime views. The default is 6000. Let's add a 0 to the end and make it 60,000.

27. When you press the Enter key you'll see the realtime views refresh with more terrain detail. As you increase the Max Polygon value, the terrain detail will increase, but you'll reach the point where the resource demand on your video card will slow interactive operations. I'm going to leave mine at 60,000 since we're working with a fairly small DEM in our Camera views.

Max Polygons = 6,000

Max Polygons = 60,000

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