Now that you have successfully installed Moonlight|3D you probably will want to take a tour of this program. This chapter takes you on a short round trip through the essential features and concepts. In this chapter you will learn how to load and save scenes, render scenes using yafray and perform basic editing, shading and animation operations.

Immediately after starting Moonlight|3d you see something similar to [TODO: screenshot of empty main window]. The window is divided into four areas or views as they are sometimes called: the area on the left is called the toolchest and holds most of the tools Moonlight|3D offers in a conveniently accessible manner. The area in the middle is the 3d view, the area where you will spend most of your time when modelling or animating your scenes. This is the single most important part of the program. The area on the right is the property editor, where you can edit parameters for objects or operations you are performing on the scene. Below this is an list which contains all elements in the scene. It is naturally empty at startup. The area in the bottom of the window holds a couple of views: a log viewer, that is sometimes helpful if things do not work as expected, a script editor and a task list. The script editor is only interesting for advanced uses of the program that actually require script automation. The task list offers an overview of currently running background tasks like render jobs or other long running operations.

In this section you will be familiarised with various basic operations in Moonlight|3D. In the following, we will work with a sample stage scene that is part of the program distribution. Click File/Open... and a you should see a familiar Open File dialog. Change into the the directory where you installed Moonlight|3D and then open the examples directory. There should be a file named stage.ml. Select it and then click open. You should now be presented with a view similar to [TODO: screenshot of stage scene immediately after loading]. Now click Render/Render using Sunflow in the menu bar to start rendering the scene and wait until a new window opens up that displays the stage scene in full detail.

Describe the controls for dollying, panning and rotating in the 3D view. ALT+LMB rotates the camera around the visible object. ALT+LMB+RMB tilts the camera around its own axis. ALT+MMB pans the camera. ALT+RMB moves the camera forward and backward.

In this chapter we used Sunflow to render the scene. Moonlight|3D is capable of using other rendering engines as well, but getting support for these to work can be tricky at times. Therefore we chose the Sunflow renderer for this introduction because it is delivered with Moonlight|3D and implemented entirely in Java, which makes it the rendering engine that is the most reliable, although it is not the fastest one.

List possible interesting follow-up topics: Mesh modelling, NURBS modelling(?)