Texturing tools - do they work?

#1 Select the "faces" button at the bottom of constructor. It is located among the "vertices,edges,faces,brushes" buttons along the bottom of screen.

Select a face of a brush.

Then go to tools/modify/translate or rotate or scale.

After you select either translate, rotate, or scale you the go to one of the windows displaying whatever view and hold down left click button on mouse and it will manipulate the texture on that face while holding down that button and moving the mouse left or right.

If you wish to manipulate multiple faces hold down key and click on the additional faces you wish to manipulate. Although it only seems that you can only "translate" multiple faces right now. You cannot scale or rotate multiple faces.

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There is some odd "ghosting" of a face when you select them though. I cannot think of any reason this would be what it was supposed to do but I am going to do up a bug report on it when I get a chance.


I do not see (as of yet) a better way to manipulate textures on the faces. Nor do I see a way to enter in numerical values in reguards to scaling,position, and rotation of the textures. This is something that either I have not found or it is not in constructor. If there is a simpler way to manipulate textures I would love to know about it. If there is not then there should be a simpler way.


I would suggest a pop up mini-window that can be placed in the main UI of the gui of constructor that will allow manipulation of the texture faces with some sort of slide button and numerical values so that allignment of multiple faces can be done more simply.

If there is a way to do this already I have not found out how. Hope I answered your question though.
The wiki is kind of a pain to negotiate and have only found out how to do most of the stuff with constructor by playing with it.

#2 This is interesting, John, because thats what Im doing, but alas, no translation, rotation, or scale occurs.

Bug perhaps? Anyone else having a similar problem?

#3 Adam,
I just tested this and it appears to still be working. Are you sure you are using the Transform Tools on the Modify tab? Just using the axis widget won't have any effect.

John,
Ghosting? Do you mean where it is showing you the texture overlayed on the face so you can line things up better? Or is it something else? It does get a little confusing when you have multiple faces selected since we aren't showing a combined texture overlay and are showing a texture for each face. This is something that should change.

When you selecte one of the Transform Tool you should see a Tools Properties panel just below them on the left (make sure it isn't on the Object Properties tab). You can type in numeric values here and hit "Make" to have them apply. Is this what you are looking for?

#4 This is what i am talking about.


This might be the overlay you are talking about. When you go to manipulate the translation it does not stay adjacent to the face however.


While doing multiple faces this gets very "buisy" on the screen and is very confusing. I have not even began to try and build any models of significance while trying to learn this program. This feature is somewhat confusing when you do use multiple faces and the idea of having all that on screen while making something more complex is kinda discouraging. Here is an example of what I am talking about.


I have yet to explore some more fancy functions of constructor due to the fact that ease of texture placement/allignment is one of the key features I am looking for in a good model creation software application.

Instead of having to go to the main menu and select the type of texture allignment procedure each time I would like to see a seperate window that just allows a quick click to get to the manipulation I would want to use. Scale/translation/rotation/fit to face. I read that "fit to face" is not in yet and I see that its going in soon. Just want to re-enforce the importance of that simple function (hehe, although I am sure its not simple to code).

#5 Matt, yeah the modify panel tools dont work. Can you think of any reasons why this might be happening? Is there a "lock material" button someplace or something like that that I may have pressed?

EDIT: Wierd, I just re-unzipped it and it all works now. Thanks John and Matt.

#6 Hummm also having problems using the properties values to manipulate the texture. It does not update realtime when you add in numbers but it does update when you manually manipulate the textures with the modify tools.

#7 John,
Yes, those are the texture overlays that I was referring to. We still have quite a bit of cleanup work to do on it ("wrapping" to stay adjacent to the face and handling multiple face selections). We needed something in place to allow people to edit textures but it is far from done/

You need to hit the "Make" button on the Tools Properties tab to make the change take effect. For example, if I select the Rotate tool and type in "10" for Angle then every time I hit "Make" it will rotate the texture/brush 10 degrees about its axis.

#8 Matt,
I have played and played with the texture properties numbers. I hit make and nothing happens to the texture when I try to translate or scale by the numbers. When rotating sometimes it does do something and sometimes it doesnt. I tried doing just basic rotations at 45 degree angles and nothing happened. If you just hit the "make" button without changing the numbers it does something, just not sure what yet.

Texture allignment is clunky and the overlay texture really just gets in the way. When I saw it today while making a basic four walls and a roof it threw me for a loop. After I manipulated the texture the overlay texture was way down on the screen and was of no use down there. Made me think I had a orphaned face to a polly down there. When I did anything with the angled roof texture That overlay texture just confused the matter because it was angled and stuck out weird from the walls underneath.

IMHO I think the overlay texture is not needed and the texture allignment process need to have the "feel" of it refined. I just dont feel like I can allign the textures with any precision. Could just be me though.

I did have some brush issues when I would get all crazy with manipulating the brush and would get various errors and I had the brush just dissapear on me a few times. I have not nailed down the cause. I keep trying to repeat it but I cant find any constant reason as of yet for this. Will keep at it to see if I can find the problem.

#9 You do know that there is a Preference to turn off the texture overlay, right? It is in the same Preferences window in the bottom right that I referred you to before.

The translate, rotate, and scale Transform tools all work for me. Try them out by selecting a single face on a cube first. Oddly angled brushes can sometimes get odd behavior with them (a known bug).

#10 I actually agree really strongly with John on this. I hate the fact I have to do everything just the widgets. Its an issue of precision. Yes, I can be precise using the widget tool, but it takes longer than simply typing "0.5" into a type-in scale field or something like that.

Making geometry is awesome in constructor, but texturing stuff is kind of a pain.

edit: Also, if im overlooking something, please tell me. Im most open to the fact that I just havent found a particular toolset or menu or something. I felt like I was a little glib in the original post, so I just wanted to sum up. The bottom line for me is that there has been a prettty standard workflow for brush based stuff for quite a few years. I know that workflow. Im fast with that workflow. I wouldnt change programs and spend the time learning a new workflow unless the program I was switching to was clearly capable of more than the one I was currently using. Constructor has some nice bells and whistles, and its potential is certainly massive for a torque developer, but if I was John Q Levelbuilder and I saw I had to align and scale each texture of each brush by hand, id say "oh too bad, I was digging this until right now". The trade off of better modeling tools for weaker texturing tools isn't one Id make.

#11 I am going to agree with John Spivey and Adam deGrandis on the Texturing and add to the after you Click MAKE you loose the ability to size the brush as well these are the biggest complaints I have with constructor..

I have a very large Project dealing with walls that have to be at 30 degree angles and it would be really nice to have the ability to size brushes when they are at angles instead of messing with the vertices that is just too big a pane for me do to the fact that you will lose the square shape of the brush..

#12 A deGrandis (since we have two Adams in this thread),
Are you saying you don't like having to hit "Make"? You can just hit your Enter key (the first one switches the focus off of the text field and the second is the same as hitting "Make". All subsequent Enter presses will continue to apply the transform. For example, if I type in 0.5 into the X field of the Translate Tool and hit Enter twice it will translate 0.5 units along the x-axis. If I keep hitting enter it will continue to translate additional 0.5 units along the x-axis. The same applies to all of the transform tools. This is very similar to how the Hammer texture editor works with their Shift, Rotation, and Scale text fields except that we have it split up among the 3 tools instead of being on one single floating interface. Is this the best interface? No, obviously not since people keep bitching about it =P Was it a temporary interface just to allow *any* kind of texturing for a Beta that people were clamoring *very* loudly for? Yes =D Will it change? As I have stated over and over, yes!

A Wilson,
So you don't like using the Scale Tool or just holding down the Alt key on the Axis gizmo? This scaling does work a little differently from the one you are using during brush creation but it can produce exactly the same results.

#13 I don't mined doing that but like it was mentioned before it is much faster to change textures sizes especially if you know how big it should be example would be if the brush is going to have 2 or 3 different textures on it all at different sizes but you know how big the texture should be just much faster and more accurate to type it in than to scale every brush down buy hand.

It would be nice just like Quark to have the ability to adjust the brush with the handles to the fact that when you scale you scale out from both directions where if you still had the handles than you could size the brush in just one direction.. This is off most helpful after you have seat your textures in the right location you can size the brush and the texture lines up right as it grows..

#14 Hey Matt. Im confused. I never said anything about not liking to hit make. I just use Enter, anyway.

Regarding the texturing, I never saw it mentioned that it was going to be changed, which is why I voiced it here. Good to know though!

#15

Quote:
but it takes longer than simply typing "0.5" into a type-in scale field or something like that.

That was the line that made me think you didn't like having to hit "Make" since you are typing in a scale and the only thing that really makes it take "longer" is having to hit the "Make" button. Was I misunderstanding this? The idea was that you would use the mouse drags to roughly line up your textures and then use the text fields to edit them into precise positions with the help of some fit-to-face and justify tools.

Quote:
We needed something in place to allow people to edit textures but it is far from done!

From this very thread =P

#16 Greetings!

I've come late to the party and I apologize. This is where I wish we had a technical writer on the team so that we could have preliminary docs done prior to beta. If you'd have known how this was intended to have worked and what is currently in the works I'd hope that we'd be able to move past this.

To begin with, remember that we're at the beginning of the beta process and still have a ways to go before release. Some features are futher along than others. So let's get started.

Texture Reference
This is what you guys were referring to as the texture overlay above. This represents the texture's current location and orientation for the selected face and has two parts to it: Texture Planes and Texture Ref. If you'd prefer to not have these be drawn at all you can disable them under the Preferences Form and all of the current texturing functions will still work.

But before talking about these references we should probably make sure we're all on the same page. As I'm sure you're aware texturing with .map files (and hence .dif files) is done through the use of two infinite planes. One plane represents the top edge of the texture while the other represents the left edge. The texture then infinitely extends from either side of these planes, repeating as it goes. From a traditional 3D application point of view you can think of this as a planar texture projection with the point where the two infinite planes intersect as an origin of sorts.

So back to Constructor. If you were to take the two texture planes and intersect them with the brush face's plane, you end up with a point in 3D space. This is the 'origin' that I'm using to draw the texture planes and texture reference that you've seen.


Using the existing (and future) transform tools will move this texture reference through space, and thus the applied texture on the brush's face will also move. When you choose to do a rotation with the Action Center set to Origin it is about this point that the texture will rotate.

The texture reference isn't intended to 'wrap' to remain near its face as it represents the texture orientation in space. In fact it doesn't need to be near the face at all. If you want to place it miles away, you can. The texture plane's orientation need not even match up with the brush face's plane. When it doesn't you get texture stretching. To check this out load up the test Orc Tower and click on the sloped roof face at the top front. You'll notice that the texture reference is way off to one side and is parallel to the world and not the face. This is just how the texture was applied in whatever map builder software was used.


Absolute Texture Placement
I suspect that what you're after is something like this:


You'd like to be able to enter in the actual values for the texture's orientation similar to how Hammer does. This will be in Constructor...it just isn't at this time.

For now you'll have to use the relative-based tools from the Tools Form that exist today which behave the same if you're manipulating a brush, a texture or a vertex -- barring any bugs of course. And speaking of bugs, as of Beta3 it looks like you'll want to stick to an Origin Action Center when rotating and scaling right now. Something has happened to the other Action Center modes along the way. :o(

Workplanes
Something you may want to play with is Align to Texture [ SHIFT-HOME ] workplane. This will orient the world to the texture reference and may make it easier to manipulate the texture. It also allows you to build geometry that is aligned to the face and texture. :o)


I hope this write-up has helped a little. Thanks.

- Dave

#17 @Matt

Ah, no. Well, I dont like hitting the make button, but thats not what I was referring to. I was talking about the texturing tools. If I know I need to scale something down by half, its easier for me to just type in .5 than try and eyeball it. I understand the state of the texturing tools now, so consider this just clarification from before.

@Dave
Thanks for the post. A few little tidbits in there were pretty helpful!

#18 Hi Adam,

Don't worry, an absolute texture tool like the one in Hammer is on our list for the 1.0 release. Ideally we'll have two tools; a Hammer like absolute texture tool, and a Max like planar mapping gizmo, which the texture planes are evolving towards.

I find the texture planes extremely flexible and very well suited for difficult texture work on oddly shaped brushes, but I find an absolute texture tool much better for texturing regularly shaped brushes. Both tools have their uses and will make good additions to the Constructor tool set.