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I'm making a model viewer that will also be used for gathering information about the character for my game. Basically, it's going to save all the animation in/out points, sound effect associated, character strength/speed/etc, things like that. It saves them into an .INI file that is easily read by my game, so anything that has been fully set up in here can be integrated into the fully game with just one click of a button.

Now, I'm starting to think that this might be useful to other people, or even just for me on later projects. But right now, it's very specific. So, I'm wondering if anyone has ideas for making it a bit more useful for others outside of just my game. What all would need to be changeable? Obvously my animation names, since they currently say specifically moves used in my game (Basic Street Fighter style moves), but I'm wondering what all should be done.

Here's a screenshot:


Any ideas? Does this look like it might be useful to anyone else? I'm attaching the full program in it's current state, so a lot of things aren't there. I've only been working on this for a very short time.

Things that *should* work in the current version:
Animation tab - all functions of it
Character setup tab - though not really useful yet
General tab - not much in it yet though
save .dbo button
wireframe button
exit button
open model button

screenshot button - makes an Images directory in the project directory, saves screenshots to that as "CharacterName".#.jpg. If no character name is set, model filename is used. Screenshot only gets the viewport, not the whole program.

animation controls - They work for the most part, though the far right one is for jumping to a specific frame. It doesn't work yet, since BlueGUI seems to have removed the single command for making an input window pop up and I'm waiting to see if there's a replacement command before doing anything else with it.

And of course, viewport camera controls. They're set up to be like Maya, so "F" will centre/fit character on screen, ALT+LMB to tumble, ALT+MMB to pan, and ALT+LMB+MMB or ALT+RMB to zoom. ALT+RMB is a bit more reliable for the zoom though.

Also, I hope this only shows up once, as the Attachment button doesn't like me at all, so I'm just posting the program online with a link to it.

http://vectorfrankenstein.com/Voyeur.zip

wow pretty nice, that would be usefull, but theres still allot of expanding you could do.

Btw are you using Blue GUI, for the ...GUI?

Thanks, good to know someone else thinks it could be useful. And for Blue, yes, it's BlueGUI 2.05 beta I'm using.

Holy cow. Your good

Very impressive. I always include something like Scaling, Rotation ETC. in case I model one object in different scale then another. That way you can code a custom loadObject() function that reads your .ini file and applies all the necessary changes to the object, rather then actually coding them all in

I plan on having a scale, rotate function, along with a reference object button to have it load another object in that has already been sized/rotated properly for the game.

One thing with scaling though...I saw briefly something about there being a bug in the scaling command...like scaling changed the normals so they wouldn't be affected by light the same way, even with set normalization on. Any truth to that?

New functionality added! I'm working on the lights tab right now, still not quite finished but I thought it was good enough to show. Link has been updated, here it is again:

http://vectorfrankenstein.com/Voyeur.zip






This is a sample of the 3 point lighting setup. There's directional light, camera light, 1 point, 2 point, and 3 point lights, as well as ambient light. All of those can be tweaked and make for a good way to check out a model under different lighting conditions. I'll add more control to them later, currently some of the sliders don't really do much/anything.

I'm thinking it would be possible for me to make the animation text/count be modifiable. So anyone would be able to punch in whatever names of animations they would need to be able to play and use this for their own projects, instead of being geared specifically for mine. Anyone finding this useful and think it would be good to use on your own? Other things like object to load as reference object would be customizable as well, in the end it would output the animation in/out points and sound effects to use in a nice, easy to use in DBPro .INI file, courtesy of IanM's .INI file writer. Pretty sure it was his, damn fine .INI file writer.

Well, I guess interest has been lost in this project. Oh well, I'm going to keep working on it, again the link has been updated. Here's all the stuff that should be working in the latest version:

Open Model - opens model
Open Project - Still adding more
Save Project - Still adding more
Save .DBO - currently just using DBPro "Save object", will be adding more
Screenshot - Saves the viewport into /Images as JPG
Wireframe - displays model as wireframe
Turntable - slowly rotates model
exit - exits program

Animation controls at the bottom all work, functions are:
rewind to start
frame backward
pause
play
frame forward
forward to end
current frame number
jump to frame number

Viewport also displays poly count and FPS

Animation tab
animation start/end frames - I'll be changing it so that end user can name the animations whatever, right now it's set up for my game. This saves in project.
sound select - sound associated with animation. Not saved in project properly yet
play animation button - plays it once
loop toggle - loop animation. Press play on another animation and it will play, then resume loop.

Character Setup Tab
character name - would be used to reference INI file for in-game loading, saves in project
attributes - I'll make it so end users can modify what these are for, not saved properly in project yet
rotate/scale character - Useful in the viewer, but I'll change it so that it settings here will become the normal for that character. Saved in project
y offset character - when you scale, here's how you'd put them back onto the ground. Save in project
refence objects - load a second object for size reference or show ground for Y=0 reference. Should be saved in project I think....

Lights Tab
5 different light setups with ambient functionality, colour/intensity adjustements - mostly working, main thing that isn't is rotating the 3 point lights. Not saved in project

General Tab
project directory - should be the root of everything when loading, not fully functioning yet. Saved in project and as default
background colour - background of viewport. Saved in project and as default
performance - This program uses the CPU saving routine. Click this to turn that off, should only be needed if you have a bunch of other stuff running
animation speed - adjust if animation is playing too fast/slow. Saved in project
sync rate - just in case you want to lock the sync rate. Saved in project
sync active - toggles the sync lock, saved in project

I think that's about it. There's definately some stuff to work out and many more features to come. I'm still open to suggestions, this started out as just something for my project but if it works well I'm going to make it free for anyone to use.

And here's the link one last time:
http://www.vectorfrankenstein.com/Voyeur.zip

Looking rather nice Catalyst

I didn't download for a very simple reason...if I do, I'll play with it all night, and I have ssooooo much other stuff to do!

I'll try your suggestion on Smart Particles. Luckily every single control uses the same single function to monitor the mouse and adjust the values. I simply pass the control ID and acceptable value range to the function and it does the rest. I'm so glad I did a proper job rather than a quick cobbled together effort, it might just pay off now.