The spark editor needs eventually to be made more powerful.
Soylent_green
Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11220Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11220Members, Reinforced - Shadow
in Mapping
The more productive an editor is, the more useless time-vampires that have been automated away, the more good maps are going to be produced.
It's been at least a year since I touched the spark editor. But there STILL doesn't seem to be any 'wrap-to-adjacent' feature yet implemented(alt+right-click in hammer). This is extremely useful. What this does is align a texture to an adjacent face so that they fit seamlessly; if you have a curved surface like a cylinder or filleted corner it is now nearly free to align a texture across it. Yes, texture unwrapping is much more powerful in a dedicated 3d program; but there are still a lot of things which are going to be "world" polygons in spark.
When selecting line-loops by double-clicking a line segment in spark it frequently selects a line loop different than the one you intended to select. If you want to select a circular loop as part of a cylinder it frequently selects a rectangular loop perpendicular to it, and you're left to manually select each face. It should not be impossible implement alt+double click or shift+double click or ctrl+double click to have it make a different guess.
Circles still have local coordinates that aren't aligned to axes; making them a bit of a pain to work with.
Autocad has some wonderful tools for working with lines in a 2d plane(which you indeed do a lot of in spark; either in one of the axis views or in the plane of a polygon preparing to extrude something); could borrow fillet, chamfer, offset, trim, snap to apparent intersection and extend line to intersection.
It's been at least a year since I touched the spark editor. But there STILL doesn't seem to be any 'wrap-to-adjacent' feature yet implemented(alt+right-click in hammer). This is extremely useful. What this does is align a texture to an adjacent face so that they fit seamlessly; if you have a curved surface like a cylinder or filleted corner it is now nearly free to align a texture across it. Yes, texture unwrapping is much more powerful in a dedicated 3d program; but there are still a lot of things which are going to be "world" polygons in spark.
When selecting line-loops by double-clicking a line segment in spark it frequently selects a line loop different than the one you intended to select. If you want to select a circular loop as part of a cylinder it frequently selects a rectangular loop perpendicular to it, and you're left to manually select each face. It should not be impossible implement alt+double click or shift+double click or ctrl+double click to have it make a different guess.
Circles still have local coordinates that aren't aligned to axes; making them a bit of a pain to work with.
Autocad has some wonderful tools for working with lines in a 2d plane(which you indeed do a lot of in spark; either in one of the axis views or in the plane of a polygon preparing to extrude something); could borrow fillet, chamfer, offset, trim, snap to apparent intersection and extend line to intersection.
Comments
Or is that a rendering engine bug?
<img src="http://i1143.photobucket.com/albums/n638/tsalerk/NS22011-10-2500-20-11-99.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Or is that a rendering engine bug?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Im no 3d expert, but I believe that is something that has no fix... lights have to light any applicable surface. In programs like maya you have the ability to control your light linking so you can choose surfaces that a light affect, but I believe that is too much to ask from a game engine... dunno tho... Ive come to expect that, and light my rooms accordingly.
You can make those lights cast shadows which usually gets rid of light bleeding like that, but if you overuse shadow casting lights you significantly affect performance, and it seems that the omnis are even worse than the spot lights when you make them cast shadows, and you also have the fade rate to worry about.
Im hoping that sometime soon we can see some fixes for the glaring issues... (rotation bug >:o) but It has been quite some time since they gave the editor some lovin....
We are very concerned with improving the editor tool, especially since we know it would help improve the productivity of UWEs mappers, immensely. However, right now our focus has to be on the game and performance improvements, before we can deal with the editor again. But there is a very large list that has been compiled of feature requests and bug fixes, and when we're able to devote some time to it again, the spark level editor will become a much more powerful tool.
--Cory
Paint tool> suggestion
Apply all the current material settings to the face that is clicked with wrapping/alignment to the previously selected face < very usfull for curved faces
also i was wondering if there is, plans of having something close to <a href="http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Propper" target="_blank">http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Propper</a> prop maker/ build into the editor so we can make our pops with the editor it self, instead of expensive 3d apps
also i use sketup alot and i think thats why i get along so well with this editor but if i could import from sketchup it would take me 10x less time..