Plan for David "Fulcrum" Wyand

Welcome to the second in a series of frequently infrequent talks about Torque Constructor. This is a continuation of my blog/.plan here. You may also want to read Matt's .plan here.

What is Torque Constructor
Torque Constructor is a .map (as in the .map file format) editing and .dif (the Torque interior file format) producing program being developed primarily by Matt Fairfax and myself under the direction of GarageGames. You may have seen the Development Snapshot of the Day posted back in March where the project was first announced. If you're familiar with programs like Valve's Hammer, with a smattering of traditional 3D apps such as NewTek's LightWave or Luxology's Modo, then you'll understand Constructor.

What I will NOT talk about
OK, let's get this out of the way up front. In this Deconstructing Constructor series I'll not be discussing release dates or pricing in these little talks. Some of you may jump up and down and wave your arms demanding this information, but all you'll get are funny looks. I'm the developer and not the publisher, so I cannot provide this information. I hope we'll not have to speak of this again. Please, don't make me get Pat's knife wielding monkey. :o)

Discussion: Opening Reference Shapes
There are many times when it is useful to have a reference to a game's character or vehicle shape when building your maps. I've often seen it asked in the forums just how big Torque's player is in mapping/texture units so that the artist may build a doorway. And Tim Aste has built a brush the size of a standard player to use as a reference in his Content Pack Combo #2.

But what if your player is not a standard size? And what about vehicles? Wouldn't it be great if you could just load in your DTS files directly and build your map around them? Please oh please, someone help us! :o)

Voila:

Mr. Torque Orc in from of Tim Aste's bombed out 1-story building from his Content Pack 2
Larger version

Constructor allows you to open any DTS file -- known as a Shape in Constructor -- which you may place within your scene. All of the brush transform tools (rotate, translate, etc) work with Shapes so you're free to locate them where they make sense. I should also note that you're not required to have your DTS files in a particular place for Constructor to load them.

Discussion: Texture Browser
When it comes time to organize your textures to be applied to your brushes, open up the Texture Browser.

Constructor's Texture Browser showing images under the TGEDemo album

Constructor allows you to organize your textures into albums. An album may be named whatever you'd like, and there's no restriction on the number of textures that may be within it. You are also not forced to place the textures into a particular directory for the Texture Browser to operate, and an album may contain textures from different directories.

When you click on an album name in the left list, all of the textures in that album are displayed. To change the current texture, you would select one of the textures and click on the Make Active button. Of course you may also change the current texture outside of the Texture Browser using the drop-down menus on the Materials Form.

Discussion: Lifting Textures
It is great to be able to select a texture from the Browser or from some popup menu listing a bunch of textures. But wouldn't it be handy to be able to lift a texture off of one brush, make it the current texture, and then apply it to another brush? Constructor allows you to do this directly from the Materials Form:

Lifting a texture from a brush that has multiple textures applied.

With a brush selected (or many brushes selected), clicking on the Lift popup provides a list of all textures being used by that brush. Select one of them and now it's the current texture. Select a new brush and then click on the Apply button and as you'd expect, that brush is now using that texture. Woohoo!

Discussion: Building a Cube
While cubes are not glamorous, they are often the starting point for a lot of maps. Rather than discuss what goes into making a cube, I thought I'd put together a video. Here's the highlights:

- Zoom into one view which changes the displayed grid size
- Size a cube in the orthographic and perspective views making use of the snap-to-grid
- Use the Texture Browser to select a texture and apply it to the cube
- Rescale the texture to fit the cube
- Make the cube into a permanent brush and deactivate the Cube tool

Show me the movie! (6MB)

Discussion: Building a Cylinder
A cylinder in Constructor shares many of the same parameters with the cube: position, size, texture scaling and texture offset. It also has some unique parameters: number of sides and texture wrapping.

The number of sides for a cylinder may range from 3 to any number you'd like. Want to have a cylinder with 400 sides? Go for it. There are of course some practical limitations, one being how small (width) each side is. If they become too small due to a large number of sides on a cylinder with a tiny radius, they succumb to floating-point rounding and wink out of existence, creating an invalid brush. In this case, no harm done -- you'd just have to adjust the number of sides.

Now one advantage to Constructor is that you get to see the results of your parameter changes in real time. No dragging out a bounding box and blindly typing in the number of sides here. You're able to make sure that the cylinder is perfect before committing it to the map.

The other special parameter for cylinders is texture wrapping. Here you have two options:

- Have the texture map itself to each face individually. Essentially making the uv coordinates align with the edge of each face.

- Have the texture wrap itself around the cylinder, repeating as necessary. This is like a label wrapped around a soup can.

OK, enough talk. Time for the movie! Here's the highlights:

- Create and size a cylinder in multiple views with snap-to-grid turned on
- Change the number of sides and notice the texture being mapped to each face
- Change the texture to wrap around the cylinder
- Select a different axis for the cylinder to be created along
- Make the cylinder into a permanent brush but without deselecting the tool
- Make two more cylinders
- Select all of the cylinders and move them in the scene
- Change the texture of one of the cylinders using the Texture Browser

Show me the movie! (14MB)

Until next time, enjoy!

- LightWave Dave