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Justify My Love (of Constructive Solid Geometry Modeling)

Josh

Entry posted by Josh ·

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One thing I love about constructive solid geometry modeling is that texture mapping is sooooo much simpler than 3ds Max. Most of the time the automatic texture mapping works fine, and when you do need to adjust texture mapping by hand, CSG texture mapping tools are still much easier. The justify buttons line a texture up along a face, or a group of faces.

 

Although using these tools is fun and easy, programming them is another matter. I dreaded the implementation of the texture justify buttons, but it wasn't that hard. It doesn't account for rotation and scale yet, but a basic implementation turned out to be surprisingly easy. I guess after writing 3D World Studio five times, I am starting to get the hang of this:

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Smooth groups are working as well. Leadwerks3D will be the first CSG editor ever (AFAIK) to support real-time smooth groups. In the example below, we have a beveled corner we want to make rounded:

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To round the corner, select all the faces you want smoothed together, and press one of the smoothing group buttons. This will assign the selected faces to use the smoothing group you press. You can add multiple smooth groups to a face. Faces that have one or more smooth groups in common will be smoothed together:

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Here is the resulting rounded corner:

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Finally, I am starting to narrow down the visual theme for the new editor. Since we use the standard Windows and Mac interfaces on each operating system, it makes sense to use the standard Windows Office/VS icons whenever possible. One side benefit is they also look great on Mac, strangely enough:

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That's all for now. I've had a lot of fun designing the "perfect" workflow for game development, and can't wait to show you all the finished product this summer!

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Rick

You know what would be really cool. Having all those easy texture controls available to us via similar easy functions so we can do this stuff via code in the same easy fashion. :)

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AggrorJorn

I am very interessted in the shader editor. Perhaps I see this the wrong way, but it seems like the shader editor is an ultimate tool to learn OPEN GL.

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Pancakes

At the end of the day it all comes down to user skill. I'm still not convinced about CSG. Trust me, if it I thought it were more effiecient/easier for me I would embrace it.

 

For starters every student of game design is learning 3dsMax anyway or blender. I also don't think CSG is faster because I find that actually designing the environment is what takes the most mental effort, pressing the keys to actually model it is generally much simpler even without CSG.

 

There are tools within the modeling apps these days that make CSG seem redundant too. For example, there is no need to wrestle with geometric volumes when modeling a basic floor plan, instead u use only planes to define and then you press a button to add thickness to everything at the very end.

 

But I'm sure you'll do a dynamite job of it

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Josh

At the end of the day it all comes down to user skill. I'm still not convinced about CSG. Trust me, if it I thought it were more effiecient/easier for me I would embrace it.For starters every student of game design is learning 3dsMax anyway or blender. I also don't think CSG is faster because I find that actually designing the environment is what takes the most mental effort, pressing the keys to actually model it is generally much simpler even without CSG.There are tools within the modeling apps these days that make CSG seem redundant too. For example, there is no need to wrestle with geometric volumes when modeling a basic floor plan, instead u use only planes to define and then you press a button to add thickness to everything at the very end.But I'm sure you'll do a dynamite job of it

It doesn't matter how well you know 3ds max. It's still more mouse clicks to do the same thing.

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