FX and UI

by David 7. June 2010 13:56

Every few days additional features are finished and others are coming closer to completion.  A lot of the back-end base code has been completed a while ago, yet a significant amount of work is required to get the features exposed through the user interface.

A few minor changes to the user interface and function methodology has occurred as TerreSculptor evolves into its final design.  The duality of the 2D MapSpace and 3D WorldSpace "toggling" interface has been changed to adopt a more simple 3D-app design where the user is presented with the full 3D front-end at startup.  The 2D MapSpace view has been demoted to a second modal dialog window that is used for the 2D "paint program-like" large file conversion process, and is accessed by choosing 'Heightmap Conversion' on the main File Menu.  Additional tweaks to the user interface have been done to better support the underlying functionality of the software and its feature set.

Unlike a "real-time" 3D application where the current view depicts the current state of such functions as boolean operations and modifiers, TerreSculptor provides a deferred view using a base heightmap and modifiers which requires that a "build" be performed to construct the final heightmap terrain.  This is required as the heightmap data can easily be many megabytes to many gigabytes in size, for which real-time processing would not be possible on even the fastest of today's computer hardware.  TerreSculptor does provide an intuitive 3D editing session even though not all scene actions can be performed interactively in the viewport.

TerreSculptor also includes a few visualization effects such as depth-fog and rotation animation.



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