Carve, hollow, and cleaning up the scene tree
Entry posted by Josh ·
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CSG carving now works very nicely. The hardest part was making it work with the undo system, which was a fairly complicated problem. It gets particularly difficult when brushes are in the scene hierarchy as a parent of something or a child of something else. Carving involves the deletion of the original object and creation of new ones, so it is very hard to describe in a step-wise process for the undo system, especially when all manner of objects can be intermixed with the brush hierarchy.
Eliminating the ability for brushes to be parented to another object, or another object to be parented to them, would solve this problem but create a new one. Compound brushes such as arches and tubes are created as children of a pivot so that when you select one part, the entire assembly gets selected. Rather than a hierarchy, the old "groups" method from 3D World Studio would be much better here. It becomes a problem when you carve a cylinder out of a brush and are left with a lot of fragments that must be individually selected.
At the same time, the scene tree needs some love. There's too many objects in it. The primary offenders are brushes, which maps just tend to have a lot of, and limbs in character models.
Filters like in Visual Studio could help to eliminate some of the noise here. I would set it up to automatically add new brushes into a "Brushes" folder in the scene tree. What would be really nice is to eliminate model subhierarchies from the scene tree. This means the limbs of a model would be effectively invisible to the editor, but would still allow parenting of different objects to one another. In the screenshot below, the crawler skeletal hierarchy is not shown in the editor, but he has a particle emitter parented to him Opening the model in the model editor will still show the entire sub-hierarchy of bones.
Notice the character has a point light as a child, but its own limb hierarchy is tucked away out of sight.
If the model sub-hierarchy were not shown in the scene tree, this would free me from having to treat hierarchies as groups, and implement a grouping feature like 3D World Studio had. Filters could be added as well, instead of relying on a pivot to organize the scene hierarchy.
To sum up, this change would cause group selection to be based on user-defined groups rather than limb hierarchy. The sub-hierarchy of model limbs would no longer be visible in the editor. Objects could still be parented to one another, and they would be parented to the base model rather than a specific limb.
What changes:
- Ability to adjust individual limbs in model hierarchy. For example, if you wanted to add a script to a tank's turret, the turret should be a separate model file you parent to the tank body in the editor. It would not be possible to set the color of one individual limb in a model file, unless you had a script that found the child and did this. Setting a color of the model would affect the entire model, including all limbs.
- Ability to parent a weapon to one specific bone in the editor. Scripts cam still call FindChild() to do this in code. Which is what I suspect most people do anyways, because diving into the mesh limbs to find one specific bone is pretty difficult.
What we gain:
- One button to group / ungroup objects.
- No more confusing multi-selection of entire limb hierarchies.
- Compound brushes no longer need a pivot to hold them together, can be created as a new group.
- Carved brush fragments can be automatically grouped for easy selection.
- If model hierarchy changes, reloaded maps match the model file more accurately; no orientation of limbs in unexpected places.
- Faster, less bloated scene tree without thousands of unwanted objects.
- Better entity selection method to replace drag and drop.
- The scene tree in general feels a lot less weighted down and a lot more manageable.
It is possible this may modify the way some maps appear in the editor, but it would be an "edge case". Improvements are needed to accommodate brush carving and address the present limitations of the scene tree. This does not involve any changes to the engine itself, except updating the map load routine to read the additional data.
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