Realtime Material Editor for TGEA-Part 2

Alrighty folks! I finally found a decent video/audio capture software and have put together a brief overview of the Material Editor. As an overview for any that might be viewing this for the first time, the Material Editor is a realtime material editing interface which allows you to create/edit/delete/manage Torque materials without having to exit the game! To learn more, just take a look at the video.


One thing I would like to re-iterate is the "Custom Shapes" option (I know I did a terrible job explaining it). In its simplest form, this option would allow you to load your own custom shapes which would act like the default shapes in that the currently selected material is viewed upon them. However, some shapes, such as the Space Orce, have two or more materials applied to them. What if you wanted to change one material (the base Space Orc material) and then select one of the other materials (such as the Orc eye) and edit it. By default, once you selected the eye material, it would be applied to all the geometry connected with the base material (i.e. the entire orc would be a red glowing blob).

As a result, I created an option which allows you to choose whether or not you want the material you just selected to replace the previous material. In the above example, once you selected the eye material, the option would pop up. If you hit "no" (do NOT replace the material), the orc would remain the same and any further material changes would affect his eye only. If you hit "yes" the orc eye material (and any further changes) would be viewed on the entire orc.

I hope that makes a bit more sense. In the next video, I will go over the principle again, demonstrating what happens when you choose either option, to hopefully clear things up a bit more.

Another thing to note is that the Material Editor is currently enabled while not in a mission. However, that will soon change as I am working on an in-mission editor which can be activated similar to the World Editor. The complete package will come with both the in-game editor as well as the in-mission editor. The in-game editor is useful for creating completely new materials, or editing materials for assets not yet added into a mission, while the in-mission editor will allow you to make material changes and see how they affect the objects within the mission in realtime.

The next blog will any new pricing/publishing updates, a new video in which I will demonstrate the material creation pipeline for getting those newly created assets into a Torque mission all materialed up, as well as demonstrating the new in-mission editor.

Pricing:
I am currently going through channels to see if I can possibly sell it in the GG store or, if not, at my own website. If everything goes successfully, the complete editor will be available for purchase at a price of $5.00(USD).