Ancient Spaces Blog

This is Glen again,

I have finished updating the widgets so that now you can control objects in the editor by dragging on neat tools :D This latest additions to the tool allows you to modify a group of objects. Also, Simon implemented a neat copy method that allows us to copy all the selected objects. This led me to a quick (took about 10 seconds) little experiement on adding many many ogreheads on the screen.

Also, along with a translate widget shown in the following pic, you can see the beginnings of an attempt to add a grid to the main editor window

That's all for today, enjoy,
Glen

Having just finished yet another tweak to the camera control system, I thought I would take some time to describe the control system we have developed. I wouldn't call it terribly innovative, but camera movement and control is solid and should allow for efficient manipulation of the camera by the user.

So, to start with, right click with the mouse has become the camera button. Holding down right click while dragging orbits the camera around a set oorbit point, Ctrl-Right dragging moves around this point, and thus the camera. This can also be done using the middle button. Mouse wheeling in and out zooms in and out of this point.

The camera feature I just added come into effect when you try to zoom in past the orbit point. When this happens the orbit point starts moving forward along with the camera allowing and indefinite zoom.

In addition to normal camera movement I spent a bunch of time this week working on the Fly Through Camera Mode. This gives you first person camera controls using the arrows keys (or w s a d) to move and right dragging to look around. This special mode is not used for editing, but can be used to explore your ancient spaces world while still in the editor.

Also in fly through mode the 'q' and 'e' keys work to raise and lower the camera, adding vertical movement to the camera.

It took a while to figure out, but the camera can switch seamlessly between normal orbit mode and special fly through mode.

The other cool camera feature is that holding down the shift key triples camera movement and rotating, so if you need to look at something far away, holding shift will get you there faster.

-Simon
Executive Director of Camera Movement

Folks -

The new Ancient Spaces website is online at ancient.arts.ubc.ca. It's an ongoing work in progress, and will be for the next couple of weeks, as we start to populate the wiki and prepare the forum for broader use. You'll see the last week's blog entries from the development team stretching out below, an engaging and trackless desert of print.

See my first blog entry for some general news and updates.

Michael Griffin
Project Mgr

The Intiwatana site contains three structures, Intiwatana Structure 001, Intiwatana Structure 002 and Intiwatana Structure 003. And... of course, the landscape which contains many staircases.

Matt has done Structure 001 and I am going to finish the rest. First of all, I built(refined) the single rock staircase that leads up to Structure 002. See here for details.

I, then, spend a few hours modeling the structure. It wasn't hard or time consuming, but it was difficult to tell the dimensions especially with half of its entire walls torn down. Again, textures took the longest to create. "Un-shadowing" the outside part of the side walls took an entire day or so. The inside part of the side walls were better because I had more images of them. By matching the seams from two different photos, I managed to get a decent texture after some editing.

The rear part of the structure consists of a series of staircases and terraces, but there's only one photo that shows them clearly. Therefore, I encountered many dimension problems when I tried to model it.

There is now content in the editor!

I spent yesterday converting Blender meshes into a format which Ogre can import. This was done with the Blender Mesh & Animation Exporter v1.0.7. A screenshot and description of the exporter can be found here.

Exporting the meshes did not go very smoothly as I ran into many issues.

First there was the "Error: error in normalize" message I got when trying to export a mesh from Blender. This error is kind of a mystery but it's caused by improper modeling of the mesh, more precisely verticies forming strange angles with each other.

Another fantastic error was the material/image error. Each mesh has to have a material. This material can be used by other meshes (ie. display_texture material). For our meshes, each mesh has one or more UV images (jpg, png, etc.) assigned to it. You can use the same image on multiple meshes (ie. a common floor texture) but the material name has to be unique! If not, what ends up happening is the meshes and material files export fine but when you try to load ASEditor it just crashes :(. luckily you can check the log file to find out what made it crash.

I'll leave you with a screenshot of ASEditor with some meshes in it. Enjoy!