The key to working in Ulead COOL 3D is basic understanding of 3D space. Because COOL 3D is so intuitive, many people often forget about the 3 planes in 3D 'space', especially the Z-plane which controls positioning in a 'front' to 'back' direction. Below is a brief discussion of working with the 3 planes in Ulead COOL 3D. (Before you begin, make sure you have a new document window open with some sample text in it to work with.)

X-Axis The X-Axis, in layman's terms, is the 'left' to 'right', and vice versa, direction when looking at a document window on the screen. To manually change the x-axis positioning of a text object, click the Move Object button on the toolbar. The Location Toolbar changes accordingly. You can now either use your mouse to drag the text object into a new position, or input the x-axis coordinates by hand. For the purposes of this tutorial, humor me and enter in the coordinates by hand. In the X entry box, type "-300". Your text moves about 3 feet to the left. Notice that the lighting on the text object appears different...this is because the coordinates of the object have changed, but those of the lights haven't. To learn how to reposition lights, please refer to Tutorial 1 in this section. Y-Axis The Y-Axis controls the position of the text object from top to bottom and vice versa. Positive values in the Y entry box of the Location toolbar move the text object up, while negative values move it down. For the purposes of this tutorial, enter a value of 100. Your text should now be positioned relatively identically to the one in the picture. Z-Axis Finally we get to the z-axis, usually forgotten about when composing new images. This axis controls the front to back, and vice versa, positioning of text objects. Negative values move the text toward you while positive values move it away from you. Enter a value of -300 in the Z entry box and see what happens. Then, enter a value of 1000. This axis is extremely useful when working with multiple blocks of text objects and you want to position them all relative to one another within the virtual 3D 'sphere' that exists in each document window, perhaps to give them more perspective and and an enhanced illusion of depth.

Text with an x-axis position of 0 and -300 respectively Text with an y-axis position of 100 Text with an y-axis position of 0 and -300 respectively