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+--- Thread: Ship Designer Quality of Life Changes (/showthread.php?tid=2035)
Ship Designer Quality of Life Changes - RonnSama - 11-13-2019
So recently I had spent roughly a week in the designer working on a new barge type ship, and put as much time and care into it as possible. During this time, I found myself missing quite a few quality of life commands to the designer that would make the development workflow a bit smoother and easier to handle. Forgive me as I'm going to be referring to a lot of these from the 3DS Max framework, (I'm assuming Blender terms would be the same, or near to these as well).
Vertex & Face Selection Modifiers -
Currently when selecting vertices using CONTROL to add to your selection, it simply toggles selection pieces. If I have half a sphere selected, hold CONTROL, and select the entire thing, then the opposite half of the sphere becomes selected, not the entire sphere. I propose fine tuning the selection controls to include ALT in the selection process. In 3DS Max, using CONTROL while selecting vertices adds all the non-selected ones to the selection, while holding ALT, removes them. This will make trying to get more ornate "non-square" pieces selected, then fine tune down the parts you don't want versus trying to get it in one go, or select faces individually.
Selection tools -
Simple enough, sometimes I find myself needing the lasso, polygon lasso, circle, or other selection tools I do not have, these would help the fine tune selection of vertices/faces.
Grow & Shrink in Vertex/Face Selection -
When selecting a vertex (if your using an editable poly modifier), and want to work on the mesh in any way shape or form, there is an option to "Grow" and/or "Shrink" your selection. Doing so adds the adjacent pieces to the selection in 1 tier. So for example, if I have a mesh plane that is 25x25 in terms of polygons (not triangles, should still be the same concept though), and I have the center vertex/faces selected, by clicking grow, the 3x3 in the center would then be selected. Shrink would obviously work in the same fashion only in reverse. The caveat to this is, if two pieces of mesh are of the same object, but are not welded, then grow & shrink only effects the a single piece of mesh, it will not jump to non-contiguous vertices/faces. This may seem like a trivial idea, but when texturing large crafts when more than say 300 faces, it tends to be difficult to select each face you want individually and get the entire segment you want to texture, this would save some time in that department.
Ignore Back-facing Option -
When making large selections, or even ones on the individual level I've noticed that hitting the spots is sometimes, well... spotty? This is usually because it is selecting something behind where I'm clicking that I cannot see. Being able to ignore back facing vertices/faces in the selection process would help solve this issue.
Mouse Cursor vs. Hand -
While I love the novelty of the hand cursor during game-play, I don't believe it fits a development environment like the ship/building designer. Even after being in the designer for hours, I'm still not exactly sure where the proper hot-spot is for the hand, and I end up missing selection pieces quite often. With something more intense, I think a mouse cursor, JUST for this area would be a better idea, I have no issue with it during proper game-play.
Unwrap UVW -
Now I know from a programmatic standpoint I have absolutely NO IDEA how this could be handled. I know it has however, and is an option for export in 3DS Max to help with creating textures. This simply allows you to color faces with base colors, and then unwraps the mesh as best as possible with all faces connected as the texture should sit if it was just applied with minimal modifiers. Think paper-craft 3D characters before they are folded up and finished.
If these options are available in the designer, I apologize I must have over looked them, I promised I tried looking for them; but I have a feeling, even with this slight "complexity(?)" added to the designer; players when more acclimated to the environment will appreciate some of these new options to help the workflow a bit. I know I have grown accustomed to them, and as I was designing I went to go use them, and realized I wasn't in 3DS max any more lol.