[osg-users] Epic releases free version of Unreal Editor

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hi Jeremy,

> You bring up an interesting point. What do you think is missing in the
> OSG world in terms of external tools? There used to be something called
> osgedit, but I recall it being extremely annoying to build. And I also
> remember a world editor called "GROME" purporting to include OSG, but I
> never investigated it.

Yeah, I've seen those, and I agree, they either didn't stay up to date 
to new OSG versions or were a pain to compile.

> I'd be interested in what you had to say about it, since you have a good
> understanding of this kind of thing. :)

Well, I just think that asset creation is something that should be 
facilitated. Of course, it's hard to make an all-in-one tool for OSG 
since OSG itself is not an engine, and various engines will be made with 
it supporting different things... But nevertheless, I've always found 
getting assets into an OSG-based app, and looking the way you want them 
to look, involved too many steps, too many tools and too much trial and 
error.

Plugins that you install into modeling software are useful, but in 
general they'll support a small subset of functionality and export that 
into .osg or some other format. Also, they often try to shoe-horn some 
of the modeling software's concepts into unrelated concepts of the OSG 
format, which I find unintuitive. Plus they only cover part of the 
pipeline. It would be nice to have an application that you could use for 
the whole content creation pipeline, from modeling, texturing, applying 
materials, shaders, and animation, and perhaps even event scripting.

(Disclaimer, I haven't tried using Cedric's most recent version of the 
Blender plugin, it's probably light years ahead of the one I used in the 
past and maybe it does most of the above. I promise I'll take a look at 
it in the near future :-) )

I'm not looking to make OSG become Unity engine (look it up, the engine 
*is* the toolset and it's pretty darn intuitive) but I just think the 
pipeline could use some dedicated tools.

J-S
-- 
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay    jean-sebastien.guay at cm-labs.com
                                http://www.cm-labs.com/
                         http://whitestar02.webhop.org/