Deconstructing Constructor - Part 3

Welcome to the post-holiday and third in a series of frequently infrequent talks about Torque Constructor. This is a continuation of my blog/.plans:

Part 1
Part 2

You may also want to read Matt's .plans:
Of mice and men and Constructor
When will Constructor Ship?

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 by Matt Fairfax, John Kabus and myself under the direction of GarageGames. You may have seen the Development Snapshot of the Day posted back in March '05 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.

Discussion: Exporting to LWO
As with many programmers, I decided to take some time off over the holidays and not think about programming. But as with most programmers, there was always that itch to do some tinkering; to try out something that wasn't planned but could be cool. For me, it was adding LightWave object (LWO) exporting to Constructor.

This was surprisingly easy to do. The biggest hurdles were adding big-endian stream writing routines to the Torque platform layer (as LWO files are big-endian in nature while Torque is little-endian), and making sure I had all of the correct IFF chunks written out for the LWO file to be correct. Now with a simple File->Export as LWO... menu item, we can place the Orc Tower .map into LightWave:

Orc Tower .map exported to a LWO file and loaded into LightWave's Modeler. Full size picture here.

For those that are interested, here's how the LWO file is set up:

* All planes are exported as triangles built from the same triangles that are used to render the interior in Torque. Could have exported n-gons, but this was the quickest method -- and quick was definitely the goal of this holiday programming.

* Each texture in the .map is exported as a separate surface within the LWO.

* All triangles that make use of the same texture are part of the same uv texture map. This gives a one-to-one ratio of surfaces to uv texture maps.

Of course, once you load up your exported .map into LightWave (or any 3D application that can import a LWO), there's lots you can do with it:

LightWave rendering of the Orc Tower at dusk

And there's certainly lots of ways this could be extended: export brush faces as n-gons; have all brush faces share vertices and move over to discontinuous uv mapping; export a LightWave scene file (LWS) to also include all .map entities as lights/nulls; etc. However none of this is in the 'official' Constructor 1.0 feature list so who knows if it will go any further. I'm sure once Josh reads this blog I'll have an email waiting telling me to get back to work on the real stuff! :o)

Well, that's everything for now. I'm going to put together another blog over the next week talking about the things I've been working on for Constructor from IGC to the end of the year. So be on the look out! :o)

- LightWave Dave

PS: For those that have read this far, here's a .zip containing the exported Orc Tower in LWO format. It doesn't include any textures so you'll need to point to the ones in the Torque 'data/interiors' directory.