This section is intended as a basic guide and source of orientation for all new users of Click-VR. To fully use this guide you will need 3ds max 7.x or higher. It is highly recommended to follow through this guide, to get to know the basic workflow concepts of Click-VR.

NOTE: It is presumed that you are already familiar with 3ds max and have 3dsmax and Click-VR installed properly.

Start 3ds Max if you have not yet. Open the sample file "sponza.max" with 3dsmax 7 or higher. You can access it through the "Tutorials" short cut in the "Click-VR Visualizer" folder of your Start Menu. There it is contained in the "Sponza"directory.

NOTE: If you cannot see the flash movie above, please make sure you have the latest Adobe Flash player installed.

The Click-VR Viewport does not only present one single rendered frame, but instead is fully interactive. By default the following navigation controls are available:

You can use the mouse to navigate in the viewport. Therefore hold down the left mouse button when the mouse is inside the viewport and then move the mouse around while still holding down the button. You will see that the camera will rotate around.
You can hold down the cursor keys to walk around.

There are objects placed for you to interact with. Locate them by moving the mouse cursor over them. As soon as the mouse cursor is above some useable object a tool tip will appear. To interact with the object just click with the left mouse button once.
For more information see: Click-VR Viewport in the User Referance. Note that the controls are just the default basic features, you will learn to create more advanced interactions later.
Now with 3ds Max move some objects around a bit, edit a mesh, edit a texture in photoshop, manipulate materials or change any other settings. You will see you can interact in the updated scene immidiatly.

Note: the only exception are lightmaps, which are not updated automatically due to performance reasons. You will learn more about lightmaps in the Lighning section below.

To switch to another viewport perspective, or change the viewport position and direction. Press the Viewport button of the Click-VR maintoolbar. The Click-VR Viewport then takes over the view point of the selected 3ds Max viewport.
The Start button resets the scene to its starting point which is the active user camera that you can setup in the Application Editor.
You can open the Application Editor from the Click-VR Maintoolbar.
All changes you make to the 3ds Max scene are updated to the realtime player automatically.
Open the Application Editor and select another camera as active user camera. Press Start again. You will now see the scene from this camera.

Click-VR offers interactive features in form of Entities that you can use interact with inside the Click-VR Viewport. These include interactive cameras, 2D menu overlays, trigger buttons, audio/video file playback, animation triggering and many more.

Entities are assigned to objects and edited using the Entity Modifier.

If you want to get an overview of the available entity classes and their features you might want to take a look at the entity hierarchy or the Annotated Entity List in the User Reference.

Materials
Click-VR uses 3ds Max's standard material and is thereby capable to render nearly photorealistic in realtime including specular and bump and normal maps. See materials in the user reference for more information.

Dynamic lighting
By using the Click-VR build realtime lighting system you can drastically speed up your whole workflow. Basicall the Click-VR realtime is similar to the 3dsmax Spot Light, however unlike the 3dsmax buildin version it can render in realtime with a high framerate including specular and area soft shadows. So you do not have to wait until your animation is rendered in minutes or hours or even more. You just add the light to your scene and press play and you can see it animated in realtime. For more information see: Spot Light


Lightmaps for static lighting
Click-VR offers easy to use per object lightmap rendering that enables you to bake all the advanced lighting features of the 3dsmax render. For example this includes Radiosity, other global illumination solutions and area shadows. The big advantages of this approach:

- Realtime performance: theres no other realtime lighting technique that is that fast. So if you have huge scenes with thousands of objects and millions of polygons you should consider using baked lightmaps.
- Rendering Quality: You can bake the complete lighting solution of 3dsmax. Especially when you are using global illumination (radiosity or other techniques for example used by the vray plugin renderer) this is the only way to get this done with realtime performance.

For more information about using lightmaps see Lightmap Editor in User Reference. You can open the Lightmap Editor from the Click-VR Maintoolbar.

This means to export the complete scene with all its graphics and interactive features to a standalone executable file. This file does not need any host program (3dsmax, visualizer) in order to run. You can distribute this published files royality free.

To publish a scene: Open the Application Editor and enter a application name. Then click on one of the publishing types and afterwards select filename to publish it. Tests your standalone 3D-Application from outside of 3dsmax.