Plan for David "Fulcrum" Wyand

Building a Better ShowTool (large images inside)

Greetings!

Time to unveil one of the projects I've been working on recently. The new and improved Gnometech Show Tool! Currently in development (now in alpha testing), the Gnometech Show Tool allows the user to view their DTS objects to ensure they have been correctly exported. You may find the current list of features at the Gnometech site: www.gnometech.com/showtoolmain.shtml but I think the pictures below speak for themselves...



The Orc player model has been loaded and the eye node has been selected by the user. With a selected node, the ShowTool draws the node's axis as well as displays its world position and rotation to the left of the view window. The run animation sequence has been selected and is shown a quarter of the way through using the animation position slider. The nodes and their parental links are shown and animate along with the object's mesh. The user also has the Detail Levels window open with the first level of detail selected.



The original Torque Guy has been loaded into a separate layer and is being rendered with a white wireframe over the texture. The head object has been selected causing a translucent bounding box to be drawn. Lights have been disabled forcing the object to be shown with 100% ambient light. The solid background colour has been replaced with a user selected image. The drawing of the nodes and node links has been disabled while the mount0 node has been selected causing its statistics and axis to be displayed.



The user has chosen a black background and turned off the grid. Environmental mapping has been enabled with a user selected bitmap. A weapon (that was loaded into another layer) has been mounted to the player.dts's hand (mount0, but it could have been any node).



The Material List window has been opened showing all of the DTS materials for the current object. The material named player is 512x512 pixels and has the S Wrap and T Wrap flags turned on in the DTS file. If the Flush Texture Cache button were clicked, all bitmaps would be flushed and reloaded (also accessible by pressing the 't' key).



The current object is being forced to display the fourth mip map level. All mip map levels may be inspected while the object is viewed full size. The Sequence List window is open showing a number of attributes for the loaded animation sequences.



The buggy.dts object's collision mesh is displayed over the object. The front right shock object has been selected causing its bounding box to be rendered. The main light has been moved over and slightly in front of the buggy by holding down the 'l' key and moving the mouse.

- LightWave Dave