Difference between revisions of "Horde3D Scene Editor"

Revision as of 23:10, 17 January 2009

A preliminary PDF documentation can be found on the project website. In the future it will be transferred to the wiki to allow the community to improve the documentation as well.

There is also a 20min tutorial video for the editor!

Horde3D Scene Editor

The Horde3D graphics engine is a SDK for rendering three dimensional data. The interface to the graphics data is defined by a Horde3D specific file format. Normally you will create a 3D model in your favourite modelling tool like 3Ds Max or Blender and export the data to a Collada file. This file can then be converted by the Horde3D Collada converter to the internal Horde3D format.

But what if you want to compose a scene where several single models should be integrated. The first possibility is to use your modelling tool, compose everything in it and export the whole scenery to create one big Horde3D file. But doing it this way suffers still from the lack of possibility to illuminate your scene with Horde3D lights and visualize it with your custom shaders. That’s why the second possibility was created: the Horde3D Scene Editor! It will create scene graph files readable by Horde3D, let you integrate your custom attachment nodes by using plugins, offers fast prototyping by pro- viding a Lua interface to all Horde3D functions and also let you instantly preview changes to shader code, materials, effects, textures and pipelines by reloading the changed files immediately and automatically after saving them.

Installation

For the Horde3D Scene Editor a graphical installer is provided for the Microsoft Windows platform. You can download the latest release from the project website. Release candidates for upcoming versions might be released in the Tools section of the forums. Currently the Editor supports two different platforms: Windows and Linux! It may be used on the Macintosh platform as well, but since I (volker) don’t have access to a Mac I haven’t tested this yet.

Windows

After downloading and extracting the compressed archive you simply have to run the Setup.exe. It will guide you through the rest of the installation procedure. After installation has been done, a Horde3D Scene Editor link has been created in your start menu and the file extension .scn has been associated with the editor. The installation directory will contain an executable as well as the source code and a Visual Studio 2005 solution.

Linux

For the installation under a Linux environment you have to install at least Qt 4.3.3 to be able to compile the editor. After downloading and extracting the compressed archive you have to run qmake, which will create the make files for your compiler. By typing make afterwards the editor will be created in the bin subfolder of the directory where you placed the extracted files.

Mac

Although it may be possible to compile the linux package under Mac OS X, I can't provide support until someone buys me a macintosh. You can find some further information in the Horde3D forums.

The first start

After you called the executable, the application starts and will present you the Horde3D Scene Editor with an empty window. During the installation two test scenes have been installed to the bin\TestScene and bin\Particle folder of the Horde3D Scene Editor installation directory. They contain a small scenery to provide you with out-of-the-box examples.

Open a scene

To open it click the file menu and select Open Scene or press CTRL + O as a shortcut. For the first test, browse to the TestScene folder and choose the TestScene.scn file. After you confirmed your selection with the open button the editor will load the scene and present it to you.