Geometry Editor 2.0 suggestion thread

[SonKim]

Geometry Editor 2.0 is going to happen , this thread is a central place to post your suggestion - this thread is not for people who want to debate about whether Geometry Editor 2.0 is a waste of time or not. With that said - what do you really want? Be as detail as you want about any features or workflow!

I created a mockup of how the GUI could look like, its pretty straight forward. You can select vertices,edges,poly,mesh,group. There's also workplane, world/local space action center. Geometry Editor 2.0 is on the left, with a bunch of modeling tools in left side, and a tool properties on the right. One thing though I move the existing brush tool in UE4 into Geometry Editor 2.0. Tools i'd like to see ,which are heavily base on Source Engine 2.o hammer editor workflow/UI. The new Hammer is a polygonal modeling app within Source 2. Read about that here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/...s/Level_Design

Here's the Geometry Editor 2.0 mock up:



1. Extrude - Select Polygon hold Shift + translate
2. Inset group - Select a bunch of polygons ,hold shift with scale tool with global action center turn on, scale inward to quickly inset the group
3. Inset local - Select one or more polygons, hold shift with scale tool with local action center turn on, scale inward to quickly inset locally.
4. Creating a new brush(i.e. box) should automatically be created on top of a existing brush(no need to press END key, only applies to the perspective view):



5. Boolean operation - subtraction,intersection,union for brush and polygonal mesh.
6. Revolve tool
7. Bevel tool(bevel edge,point,poly). For poly bevel, LMB = extrusion,MMB = inset . Most of groups of polygons.
8. Thicken tool, for create walls really quick.
9. Push/Pull tool ala SketchUp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb-Adao_Q1c

being able to select ring,loop,etc would be handy. hotkeys and UI. double click on edge to select loop.

10. Pivot tool - used to change the pivot of a mesh. Insert key ala Maya
11. Freeze Transform, zeros out X,Y,Z coordinate to the origin(0,0,0)
12. Connect tool, depending on the selection mode(i.e. vertices,edges,polygons.) Select 2 vertice, run Connect will create a edge between them. Select 2 edges , run Connect will create a perpendicular edge between them. Select a single edge, will loop slice.
13. Repeat Last command
14. Changing Grid space with hotkey(i.e. [ and ])
15. Hard/Soft edges ala Maya
16. Right Click context menu gear toward modelling
17. Quick Duplication - Select mesh , turn on translate hold shift, drag to duplicate
18. Rectangle Selection
19. Lasso Selection
20. Instancing
21. Support Ngon, quads,triangle
22. Merging mesh
23. Separating mesh
24. Creating material base on polygon selection
25. UV tools.
26. Dissolve Edge - select edge press backspace
27. Bridge tool ala Source Engine 2 hammer with twist option.
29. Subdivide - Ala modo Catmall clark ..not asking for subdivison surface here.


I was able to model this in Source 2 hammer(I'd love to do the same thing with Geometry Editor 2.0!):

[Godling]

Being able to create or place geometry via animation is always nice.. presuming it doesn't already. <--- new guy.

[Soulrolll]

The ability to Fit or Tile Material to a face of the mesh/geometry/brush would be nice.

[Zeustiak]

If the new geometry tool provides a good way to assign UVs inside the editor I would consider it mission accomplished!

[Jason Wanderer]

All I need is geometry to be a bit less taxing on the system.

Thanks for starting the thread!

~ Jason

[Ivey]

Thanks, SonKim, for combining these all in one place. It's certainly a lot easier to get a look at As mentioned in JoeWintergreen's post, we don't currently have a timeline for Geometry 2.0, however, this helps us to better understand what's important to you all when approaching future changes to geometry tools.

Thanks again!

[Soulrolll]

Pretty much agree with everyones ideas in the thread, there's no need to change the existing 3D artist / production workflow but just offering some of us old bsp farts the choice to use and texture simple geometry would be great :P valve seems to have already implemented this in the new Hammer and you would be quite surprised with what is able to be achieved with that old way of doing things.

[Ballowers100]

Oh yes I remember asking if Epic Games can include geometry for decals in Unreal Engine 4 because I saw it in Source 2.

Here is the topic I made like months ago.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...Hey-Epic-Games

I would like to see that in Unreal Engine 4.

[Wanderer_eternal]

Yeah ideas are great really. But the most important thing for me is the performance. Modifying the brushes and wait for them to happen is a waste of time while working with bsp. A massive improvement on performance is a must for me.

[SonKim]

Icing on the cake, but this feature would be extremely useful within UE4 Geometry Editor 2.0. MatchPhoto:

[Godling]

Modifying the brushes and wait for them to happen is a waste of time while working with bsp.

Haven't played with BSP in ages so I'm outa touch a bit on the subject, but I've never heard of editing bsp brushes as being that dif than poly editing in any 3d software. I've never encountered performance issues when creating new bsp brushes or had to wait for them to 'happen'? This is alien to me... what game engine or program is like this that you used?

[Wanderer_eternal]

Haven't played with BSP in ages so I'm outa touch a bit on the subject, but I've never heard of editing bsp brushes as being that dif than poly editing in any 3d software. I've never encountered performance issues when creating new bsp brushes or had to wait for them to 'happen'? This is alien to me... what game engine or program is like this that you used?

I'm talking about UE4. In some maps, working with bsp is... "ok". But in most of my maps; for example I created a bsp and modified it's height, width or put texture. But then I hit ctrl+Z and I wait for couple of minutes, most of the time more. So I quit working with them. I'm putting thousands of rocks as foilage, detailed meshes from Maya but the system can't handle a couple of bsp brushes' histories.

I found that there are other people who suffer the same. Simply, bsp editing maybe very system specific thing which is bad for it. I don't know.

[Meathead]

Yea we really need a new workflow for BSP or something to replace it. As a artist myself I always build BSP first to get the feel and size of my level inside UE4 but with how slow it is in UE4 to just build a basic level/scene it gets annoying. Hammer 2 looks great with them tools but dont have live playing unlike UE4

I cant wait to work with the new BSP tools when they come out!

[SaxonRah]

I think its quite fascinating how quickly people are able to throw a good tool away. There are so many people complaining about this tool even getting a little attention and i don't quite understand why. CSG is one of the best tools we have to date, a well developed CSG tool set is a essential one, especially for game development. Games still use csg. infact it's quite normal for an engine to still support and use CSG. CSG is far from dead.

CSG have amazing qualities. for example;
static lighting's light-maps are quickly allocated to CSG brushes, with volume intersections it can quickly choose which object do not cast shadows onto a surface.

Dynamic lighting needs a good occlusion system to work well, something like portals, where they separate the scene in to large chunks (portal zones) and they are connected by doorway portals. this allows the render-er to skip entire chunks of geometry that is not only off screen but occluded by other objects in the foreground. This is vastly complicated if not impossible without CSG.

BSP is a way of optimizing a static scene by splitting the geometry into a recursive hierarchy of bsp leaves forming a bsp tree, the bsp can be used to optimize collisions, occlusion, and many other calculations by excluding vast regions of scene that is irrelevant to the scene being rendered. Performance gained using bsp are exponential.

--------------

• Necessities
  • Convex, Intersecting Co-planar faced geometry.
  • Concave can be made with multiple convex solids.
  
  
• Basics
  • Distance between point and plane. get whether or not a point is in-front or behind a plane.
    • Distance between point A and plane B =
      • (Bd – Bnx * Ax – Bny * Ay – Bnz * Az)
    
    
  • Equation for ray plane intersection get the intersection point of a line in 3d space with a plane
    • Intersection of ray AB with plane C:
      • u = (-Cnx * Ax – Cny * Ay – Cnz * Az + d) / (-Cnx * (Ax – Bx) – Cny * (Ay–By) – Cnz * (Az – Bz))
      • x = Ax + (Bx-Ax) * u
      • y = Ay + (By-Ay) * u
      • z = Az + (Bz-Az) * u
    
    
  • Point/Sphere-Solid Intersection
    • Check if a point/sphere exist behind every face of the solid, if it does it lies in side the solid.
    
    
  • Ray-Solid Intersection
    • If a ray's intersection point and any of the planes in the solid are behind all other planes, the ray is intersecting solid.
    
    
  • Solid-Solid Intersection
    • If any vertex of either solid is within the other solid, the solids intersect
    • If any of the edge of one solid intersect the other solid, the solids intersect
    
    
  • Find the silhouette of a solid from a point or vector
    • Each edge lies between two face. If one face points towards the point, and theother points away, that edge is part of the outline. The silhouette of a convexobject is always convex.
    
    
  • Extrude solid from point or vector
    • Find the silhouette of the solid, then extrude away from the point or along thevector. This creates a solid that defines the shadow volume of the original solid.If a point or solid is within this volume, that object is completely occludedby the original solid. These kinds of extrusions are used frequently in lighting andportal occlusion.
    
    
  • Solid Slicing
    • A solid can be sliced in half with an arbitrary plane. This is used frequently inportal and BSP occlusion systems.
    
    
  • Texture mapping
    • u = (unx * x + uny * y + unz * z + ud)
    • v = (vnx * x + vny * y + vnz * z + vd)
    • Can be done real-time. generated texture mapping axes per face, can be user controlled with params like scale, rotation, position, shearing.
    
    
  • Linear and Circular extrude.
  • Union, Intersection, Difference.

[darthviper107]

Actually, the developers have said before that BSP gives less performance than using Static Meshes. The only benefits to it is that it's already in the engine and you don't have to deal with lightmap UV's.