Engine Update: Sketching in 3D

Over the past 2 months I haven't posted a lot of news. With the new project up and running (kick-off was the 13th) I'll start doing more regular postings like I used to.

With the project details still being worked on, there is some time to develop tools that should make life easier later on in the development stage. So I decided to work on some odd ideas that I came up with while traveling. The first one is a pretty cool feature, its sketching in 3d. It uses the 3d meshes inside the level as a canvas to draw on. I think this is very useful for level designers and to help process play-testing feedback.

For this particular feature to work, triangle precision ray-testing was required. Luckily the XNA Creators Club had a sample project to get me started. The lines are made of vertices combined into a LineStrip. In addition the triangle normal is tested against the ray direction to prevent drawing on back-faced triangles.

While implementing triangle-precision picking I updated the Gizmo so it is now able to select models by triangle instead of the small boundingbox. Being used to 3D studio max' selection methods I decided to implement multi-layer selection. Because that name probably makes no sense, I'll try to explain it. If multiple objects are behind one another, clicking multiple times will select the object behind the previously selected object, clicking again will select the one behind it etc. That means you can select any object even if another is blocking your view.

Each click will pass through another "layer" and select the object occluded by the one in front.