Constructor testing blog - Don Hogan

#1 On to the experience.

The first thing I did was create my own texture album. The texture swatch caught my attention and when I clicked 'Browse' there were all these nifty options so I tried them out. At first I fooled around and imported a folder of my textures into the TGE demo album. Then I figured out I had to make a new album first, *then* import and boom it was done. Of course, then I had to delete my 18 textures from the demo album one by one which was a little slow. Given how fast doing it the right way is, that's no big deal.
I decided to start with a simple wall using a texture which tiles horizontally and requires some editing at the top to create the stone cap with a small overhang. In max, I might start with a cube then either extrude the top or slice it a couple of times and move some vertices. The idea in texturing this way is to be able to wrap the corner(s) of your geometry so you don't get the typical seam where texture edges don't match up.

So I made a cube and assigned it the wall texture, and used the slice tool to position it just below the break from wall to cap. I got a nice perfect slice just where I want it.

It got considerably slower from that point. I made another slice vertically thorough my cap piece so I could get a point on top of the wall, but when I start to move verticies around, I lose the alignment of the texture. If the UVs could be 'stuck' to the face, I'd have been done in about 3 minutes and moving on.

It helped to discover that I can cut and paste UVs from face to face, though I did wind up settling for UVs that were not quite what I wanted.

It would be nice if after exports it gave a "complete" message. It stops at "Cleaning up..." or "Deleting auto converted map ..." and I found myself waiting for it to let me know that it was finished.
- It would also be good in this case to disable the "close" button

I was only able to successfully export a .CSX file to DIF; but the default file format on saving is MAP, which hasn't worked for me so far.

It's different. Not in the sometimes "I'm trying to find something nice to say" way, but in the simple reaction to a new tool way.

The brush style UVs are nice to see right off the bat, and its fun to see them just tile correctly when I adjust an object as it's being created. That's different, and I like it.

I want to be able to input an object's size. It feels like a Max primitive, I instinctively want to treat it that way.
- Since I know Kork's size and the dimensions I like to build for him, being able to at least start with a sized primitive would be great.

I want to be able to resize by dragging a face, just like I can on creation.

It seems like the primitive object should default to being made on the base grid no matter what view you're in.

On 2 occasions, I brought in a crate to use for scale and both times when I saved and exited the scene, the next time I loaded it the DTS object was gone.

I don't completely understand how to tweak the UVs on a brush, I want to use the transform gizmo but it doesn't respond.
- Updating with the spinners works well, though I feel like the default is a little slow - I.e. 3 decimal points of precision may be a bit much
- Also, if you've scaled the brush using the size bounds function, the values for the UV adjustments are relative to the brush's original size, not the current size.
- - This is a case where the UVs have 'stuck' to the brush face like I was saying I wanted when trying to wrap a texture around corners.

Size with bounds is a nice way to adjust without having to redo your UVs; perhaps even in spite of the above mentioned issue.

The Knife tool is nice, the way you just drag the cut line and can then move it into place feels intuitive.

Having a second brush created when I use knife is not what I expected, but I understand why and can see how I could get used to it as part of my workflow.
- But, why didn't the bottom face of my new brush get a texture?
- If I have a brush without a material on a face, Constructor will crash when I try to do anything to that face.

Rotating the gizmo for Slice doesn't feel quite right yet - there's a lot of 'mouse wrestling' to get it to snap when shift is held down.

I'd like to be able to assign some of the viewport navigation functions to other keys. Maximize window to spacebar, for one.

#2 Hey Don,
Thanks for the input! It is always good to hear these sort of things. One thing that I wanted to mention is that, in the last couple of weeks, we have fixed a *lot* of the bugs/oddities that you mention. We will be releasing a new beta very soon and it should hopefully be a much smoother experience for you! I really hope that you will be willing to revisit it with the latest beta when it comes out =)

Thanks!

#3 Oh, absolutely! I know that I've just scratched the surface and I've already got plenty of what-if questions bouncing around to try out.

I do hope that what I've posted is useful; I apologize for the odd format, I just knew that if I didn't do something as I went along it would slip through the cracks and I wouldn't get any sort of feedback made.

What I did after this post was to complete a side by side comparison of the wall I described made in each method. I have to say the differences in seeing them together in-engine is really startling. I'm going to have to re-think a pretty big project. =)

#4 I got a little more time in today and here's the notes.

The interface doesn't like Wacom tablets. That doesn't really surprise me, I am sort of an oddball (so it seems) in trying to use a stylus for everything.

Hey! There you go - if I'd paid attention to the properties panel and set it to 'Tool'. I'd have seen that on creation I can input the dimensions and location of my cube. Plus bevel some edges if I like - good stuff!

I'll be interested to give the UVs a good going over in the next Beta, right now, the more I work with a face, the crazier it gets.
- To me more specific, if I fit a texture to a face, then change to a different texture, the new texture behaves like the default UVs.
- At first, I could reassign the old texture and it would go back to my change. The more I tried to make it behave the way I wanted, the worse it got. I can seriously mess up the UVs this way; not even copy and paste can save them.
- This is probably a result of me trying to make something behave not as intended.

I may or may not hold off until the next Beta drop, I am enjoying working in the app.

#5 We have majorly revamped the texturing tools with the latest builds (including an Align to Face button that would have solved your problem).

#6 Hi Matt, since you mentioned the new texturing tools I just want to let you know that after trying beta18, textures still scale when scaling a brush. I've tried all three buttons (World, Face, Unify) and still no luck, they don't stay locked. Unless I'm mistakenly thinking that this feature is covered in this release.

#7 Nope.

The only way to do what you want is to use vertex editing. We may roll in world space locked texturing but it will definitely be post 1.0.

#8 Thanks for replying. Yes, I did get texture locking when editing vertices. Although I find it extremely difficult scaling only one edge without moving the others which doesn't help. And I'm getting various crashes on vertex editing although I get them after doing something silly. Ok won't hijack this thread any more.

#9 I haven't forgotten or stopped working with Constructor, I just haven't been very good about my notes recently.

2/24/07

I'm really trying to get the hang of textures in Constructor. I think modeling will fall into place easily enough, but texturing is just really difficult so far.

The bug where the cursor disappears after using a viewport pan control makes me think that the dialogs need some sort of indicator as to what's default when enter is pressed.
- For beta software I don't mind needing to do things like close & restart and this would make saving & exiting easier when you can't see the cursor.

It appears that the copy & paste between faces isn't working as it was in Beta 17, and that is slowing texturing down.
- After more work, it's not working for me on new objects, but it is working on files made in Beta 17

More often than not, the UV icon isn't centered on the face when the center to face button is pressed.

The scale of the UV icon doesn't always make sense with the visible result.
- Sometimes the icon appears very small even when you fit to face.

When I choose the preference "Select Only" I still end up selecting verticies from multiple objects.
- This really changes the way I have to work, which is new enough for me already. =)

#10 I thought I'd share what I've been working on which is ultimately what I'd like to move into Constructor / DIF. The process for making DTS versions of this stuff is really quite fast for me, but the important point is that most of my time (easily 80%) is spent tweaking Textures and the UVs. In terms of modeling, I think I could get really close with constructor rather quickly, but being as fast and efficient will obviously take more time.

This is another part of my 'scratch pad' area, where I was working through the wall technique I mentioned earlier. The nearest wall is a DTS and the other DIF. Two things really surprised me: 1) the dramatic difference in lighting 2) the fact that the DIF wall cast a soft shadow on the ground. I don't know what I was expecting it to be sharp edged, maybe because of the plyer shadow on DIFs. I also didn't realize that to update a DIF texture I would need to re-export. As you can see on the DTS wall, I overwrote a texture it was sharing with the castle base and it is now incorrect. I'm used to that workflow of saving out of Photoshop and only having to re-run the game to see the change. That will be a nother big one to get used to.