Brushing Up on CSG
I feel like I've resolved the design challenges I was facing in my last blog. A menu item is always checked, specifying what the current object is that will be created when the user clicks on a viewport. There are two types of objects that can be created, brushes and entities. Brushes are constructive solid geometry objects that can be sketched out to quickly design a building. Entities are created at a point in space, and include lights, sounds, and particle emitters. As I have described it, this is pretty much identical to the 3D World Studio workflow.
Models in the Asset Browser are another thing. This is where the Leadwerks3D editor is very different from 3D World Studio. Models can be dragged into the scene from the Asset Browser, in either the 3D or 2D viewports.
In the 3D viewport, we will have position/rotation/scale control similar to that found in Leadwerks Editor, the editor for Leadwerks Engine 2. We will improve this with a button to toggle between global and local space. Since 3D World Studio has no 3D editing mode, this can be implemented without interfering with our powerful classic CSG workflow.
I think the design I have laid out here will be simple enough to figure out without reading a manual, require the fewest number of mouse clicks possible, and most of all feel natural and fun to use, a quality that I think modern modeling applications have largely lost.
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