Torque Pipeline for Cartography Shop - Beta 2 Released!

#1
All primitives working now... Yeah! :D

#2 A primitive forest!

Also note you can now download the help file separately for those of you that want to read up about it before you bother to buy CartShop. You can download the CHM file directly from here.

And please give me feedback on the docs... i know there is alot of room for improvement in there. Give me some suggestions. =)

#3 Tested collision_brush and it's working great now.

Re improvements to docs... there's only one thing I can see... in the Portals entity section, put a brief explanation of what portals are used for... when I first read that I didn't know how it was to be used. Everything else has good explanations.

#4 Yea. I decided it was better to just break with how map2dif does collision brushes. In map2dif adding one or more collision brushes disable collsion for the entire scene. In the beta 2 i've added a flag to worldspawn if someone wants to totally disable the structrual brush collision and collision brushes are additive to the scene. Also as a new trick you can disable collision on detail brushes.

Yea.... good catch on the portals. I really don't enjoy writing docs... so it has been painful, but it's shaping up to be a good general collection on how to build Torque interiors.

#5 I finally bought CS but will have it only on monday I think. Can't wait to try to export something with it and see how cool it is :)

But, how much will be the exporter ?

#6 Great job on the exporter Tom. I'm really enjoying the creative process using CS. Now I just have to improve my modelling skills ;-)

#7 @Gilles, the last stated price I have seen was less than $10.00.

#8 @Will, outch ! No problem then :) Thanks for the info

I played with CS and the exporter all day (received my links this morning) and the more I try things and the more I like it. I've been able to find my way throu a lot of things that I though was missing at first and I can do almost evething. I like how we can navigate on the 3D map much and also the group colors in solid shape mode is really usefull on a map with lot of stuff. I'm really happy with it knowing what is planned to the exporter.

Here is what I think is missing, or didn't find the tricks :
1 - In CS, there is no arch primitive, that's really a bad miss for me. But I will prepare myself prefabs so this is not too much of a problem. Just more time at the beginning.
2 - I find that I can set the "geometry_scale" on each pieces, but not for the map or all object. And I'm not sure if Torque will use individual scale, I'll have to try it and/or look at the codes. There is maybe a way to do it but I didn't find it. Doing it after the map is finished will be a big job to do. But it's not a big problem if you know that before doing the map.
3 - After exporting the map, some of my textures are offset. They are ok in CS, but when I look in torque, they are all messed. It only happen on object where I did a hard job to align the textures, so it's probably me doing something wrong. I'll do some testing ...

I only talk about those in case someone give me a hint as I just got CS this morning and I'm learning the tool. I'm almost sure there is ways to solve them because I had a lot more problems then this this morning, hehe.

My conclusion : CS and the exporter is the way to go if you are an "old timer" modelist (3DMAX or Maya) that is now doing .map . Forget about Quark, you'll save you lot of headaches and time :)

Thanks Tom !

#9 Great to have you join us with CS! :D

Be sure to check Tom's exporter forum, for news and help with exporter or CS problems. Afterall, it's only in beta 2 now, so there is room for changes and improvements. :)

1- For an arch, you can make it with the box primitives and using the rotate and vertex edit functions.

2 - To scale the whole map, you can go Edit --> Select All, and then manually scale everything with the transform nodes. Or you can "individually scale" DIFs in Torque by going to Inspector Mode (F3) and changing the scale numerically in the transform box.

3 - For textures, I read that alot of manual editing of vertices and UV coordinates create problems... and that, only "Automap" is supported right now. Automap is the default and should be on, but try to change it and see what happens... to turn it off, click an object and press "P" to open the Properties dialog... then click the Automap check box. I don't know too much here, as I have also only started to use CS, but I hope that may help.

#10 Using the 'Select All' method to scale a map is a tricky thing. In general that usually causes stuff to go off the grid which can cause trouble in exporting. I suggest to just resize individual brushes keeping things on the grid or do an overall scaling when inserting the interior in the Torque mission editor.

If you get a map where the texture isn't mapped correctly and it has "automap" enabled let me know. I thought i had those cases all working correctly.

#11 @Tom, I had automap Off. For a lot of what I'm doing (non standard and non square things), I really need to turn this Off. Will you support it later ? In the waiting, I'm back with Quark :( .

Btw, I successfully openned my old maps in CS4.1 with the help of the Leadwork converter. I think it was related to textures that are not good. Look at the textures that it extract and you'll see that they are wrong. I just put mine in and it's working.

I'm a little deceived of CS for the lack of "little" options that could have made this editor the best one for torque artists. I was expecting it to be as good as hammer, but the little missing options make it a "no-go and use Quark to save time" like it is right now. One of the badiest thing that is missing is that you cannot select multiple brushes with the mouse. On an heavy map with much detail, it can take a couples of hours to select a group of brushes, that would have take 2 sec with any other modern apps. Nway, it's a great tool, and maybe it is awesome for other engines, but I go back to Quark for 80% of my needs right now. So I will probably only use Quark because I'm not sure it will be usefull to use 2 editors. GG, do a map editor please ! :)

But this is CS related and nothing to do with your exporter that is doing a good job, except for the automap :)

#12 @Giles

Quote:I had automap Off. For a lot of what I'm doing (non standard and non square things), I really need to turn this Off. Will you support it later ? In the waiting, I'm back with Quark :( .

I'll try to up the priority on it, but note that it will never work in all cases. If you skew or vertex edit a brush with automap off you'll normally create UVs that cannot be converted back into the format that DIF requires them in. A big change to Torque itself is required to fix this.

Quote:One of the badiest thing that is missing is that you cannot select multiple brushes with the mouse.

You can. Hold down CTRL then click on all the brushes you wish to select.

#13 @Tom, that is good news. It'd be appreciated. Thanks ! As for working, I'm sure it will as it is working when doing the same model with Quark and Hammer and show up good in torque.

hehe, yup, CTRL and click select brushes. I wanted to say that you have to select one brush at a time (holding CTRL). You can't select multiple meshes by dragging the mouse over a group to select them all at once. Or is there a trick ?

#14 @Gilles, no there isn't a lasso like function for selecting multiple brushes. I've not run into this issue myself, but i guess it only really begins to show when you work on really big maps.

#15 Very cool Tom... still trying to scrape together the funds to get this, in any case if the exporter final releases before I can buy CShop I will still purchase the exported to help keep you going at this... great work... Right now my map designer is saying that its worth getting to work in conjuction with quark (maybe large things where the lasso tool, or the texture capabilities will need Quark) while the simpler things that should be quick and easy to make, that usually aren't in Quark, will be good for this.

Look forward to seeing the future of this

#16 Using CShop along with another tool like QuArK is possible to get working. Right now importing a Torque .map file into CShop doesn't work, but i could maybe write one myself if need be. But using CShop to get basic geometry and texturing then export to .MAP for use in QuArK or another map tool for final details is an option.

Still i don't find that a very ideal art pipeline. CartShop still can do 99% of everything we need and we have work arounds for other issues. I need to press Josh again about CartShop 5.

#17 Could be really usefull to have an importer right in CS, but is not high priority like the texture (automap) is. We could do our arch with Quark and import them.

The lasso thing is used a lot with large map. Example that I can think of is when you want to copy a group of things. Or you don't want to touch a group when working on other parts.

But It is only for saving time, it's not something that lead to not be able to do something with CS. I never said that we can't do things with CS, we can do everything, I just said that this is a longer path because of those little missing options. We are dreaming to have 1 legal tool that is doing the job and that is artist friendly (the programmers seems to like Quark much). CS is really near to be that tool right now, but with some little additions, it could be THE tool.

I did made a medium map as a test with CS after I had learned everything CS can do and cannot do. It took me 3 hours. I did the same thing in hammer in 20 min, mainly because of the arch tool and the lasso. And with CS, I had to use the automap on some parts so it wasn't looking good in Torque. The hammer texture version was ok. But Tom will solve this one for us one day :) . I can do a webpage with screenshots of this "comparative test" if someone want to look at it and see the complexity of the map.

I was only deceived about CS because I really though all those little thing where there and that I had "the solution" finally, but I like it much and again, you can do everything with CS. If your doing only buildings and standard maps, it will be the same time to do it in any of the apps. But CS is a better experience :)

#18 @Gilles, it's too bad you didn't notice those things in the demo version... but it's still good to have in your toolset I guess. I'm sure all these "little" things will be fixed in version 5 of CS. :)

One thing about selecting multiple brushes... you're right, it does slow you down... but I find that by grouping things and using Edit-->Select All, it's not so bad... and also, if you select things in the 3D viewport it's faster because you don't have to click on that little "x" thing in each brush (or the edge of the brush)... you can just click anywhere in the shape. Still, it is something that should be fixed.

#19

Quote:it's too bad you didn't notice those things in the demo version...

hehe, I was too much excited :)

Quote:but it's still good to have in your toolset I guess.

Definitly. It's a great tool and I will use it with other editors to make all my needs. I don't have the impression to have lose my money, no worry :) . Except maybe that the guy seems to focus on CS5 and forget about CS4, so I should maybe have waited for CS5. I'm not a programmer so I like when my products have support and updates :) .

I'm feeling the same with TGE and TSE. They have dropped TGE since the day they talked about TSE (no more CVS updates so forget about adding the new stuff in your current project, etc ...). But at least, with TGE we have the sources so my brother can do all what my artistry brain need :)

#20 @Gilles

I've found that those techniques Will mentioned ( grouping common subsets of geometry as you build, using select all and removing things you don't need, and selecting in the 3d view) can really help when your building more than a simple room.

Quote:Except maybe that the guy seems to focus on CS5 and forget about CS4

I was just thinking about emailing Josh and talking to him about maybe handing the source to CS4 to some other trusted entity to add those little features before CS5 comes along.

Quote:They have dropped TGE since the day they talked about TSE (no more CVS updates so forget about adding the new stuff in your current project, etc ...).

Personally i wished that were true as TSE would progress faster and the community wouldn't end up split between the two engines (even though they are mostly the same code). TGE will have an update soon to 1.4 with alot of new additions... before the GDC is last i heard. Those updates will then be merged into TSE after it's released.