Mesh Material Editor Plugin

[pera]

Dlangdev said:
I have made several mockups and here is just one of them. Maybe you can tell if you can easily figure it out without even asking what it is. Because that's my goal, the form should be obvious to the user, it should communicate with a clear message.

Let's do some design mock-ups first and see what parts of the code will overlap.



By the way, we can take this conversation private, I don't want to waste resource by posting in this thread, but if it is OK with you I can post public in any thread you want to setup.

[pera]

I find it easy to understand, the form, but I don;t know what colormap, normalmap and those things would do, but i guess clicking on them would be selfexplanatory.

Here, how about mesh preview there:



so you can see what you do immediately.

[JP]

I think if you don't understand what colour and normal maps are then you shouldn't be using it

Colour map/Diffuse map is the texture applied to the mesh to give it a colour, so sydney.bmp is the colour map for sydney.md2.

Normal map is for normal mapping, definitely don't need to worry about that if you don't know what normal/bump mapping is.

[dlangdev]

I made some changes to the dialog box. This time the dialog box was modified resulting from a use-case made a while ago. See below for details.

[pera]

How do you save selected data?

[Virion]

save into an xml file i guess

[dlangdev]

How do you save selected data?

That's a good point, once a material is modified there should be a code to save it back to the file. But I don't think there are any at the moment.

It may be good to use the irr file format and save the modified values in there.

Also, here is another screenshot. FPS and Maya cameras were tested in this screenshot.

[dlangdev]

A few items were added:

1) Vertex color image button was added.
2) File open image button got added.
3) Preview bitmap added.

Vertex and File Open image buttons has code behind them that will set the color of the bitmap to the color selected and the other will populate a textbox with the filepath of the texture.

[Virion]

cool... so it saves the settings into .irr file? and i see that you put the word "fixed function" so i guess there will be another one for shader am i right.

[dlangdev]

Yeah, that's the idea. That's probably the easiest way of doing it.

It would be nice to separate Fixed Function from Shader, though.

For now, I'll focus on Fixed Function and see how it goes.

Feel free to comment and contribute, it's good to see people have a say in the design.

[pera]

so you have a scene in editor, you select a model in the scene, and then you chose Material Configuration from menu or context menu, is that how it works? Then when you click save, material info are first stored to selected scene node, then later when you save the whole scene, material data is automatically saved to irr scene with the selected mesh data? I don't know if these material attributes are already meshscenenode's class members that get serialized automatically?

[dlangdev]

so you have a scene in editor, you select a model in the scene, and then you chose Material Configuration from menu or context menu, is that how it works?

Yes, that is correct.

Then when you click save, material info are first stored to selected scene node, then later when you save the whole scene, material data is automatically saved to irr scene with the selected mesh data?

Yes.

I don't know if these material attributes are already meshscenenode's class members that get serialized automatically?

Good question, I haven't looked into that part, though I remember writing a test program for serializing data members. I don't have an answer for that and it will be probably take a few more weeks to get to that level of testing.