One thing I hate about Panda is how difficult it is to quickly experiment and preview something. Basically, the default scene is useless for experimenting and debugging. For example, I want to try out the CardMaker class, so I make a card and parent it to render, run my scene, and ofcourse I get a blank grey screen and don’t see the card anywhere. Where is the card in the scene? (presumably at (0,0,0), but I can’t see where that is). Where is the camera? (I’m guessing it’s at (0,0,0) also hence why it doesn’t see the card on top of it.) Is the camera looking at the card? Is the card too big? Too small? At the wrong orientation? How should I position the card so that it will be on the camera’s field of view? You can’t tell anything because all you see is grey, and there’s no point in trying to move the camera around under those conditions (not to mention the bizarre camera controls).
Is there, perhaps hidden somewhere in this forum, code for creating a more useful testbed for quickly throwing together and testing your scenes?
The only thing I could find is a pair of modules draw.py and camera.py that I posted as part of the code in this thread: discourse.panda3d.org/search.php?mode=results
This is enough to get me going, if I load my CardMaker code into the test environment scene of draw.py I can immediately see the card when I run the scene, and can move the camera around with the keyboard and see where it’s moving, because gridlines are drawn for reference.
draw.py doesn’t really seem like the simplest or most efficient solution. though. The lines flicker and disappear as the camera moves. I feel that all that drawing of lines with moveTo and drawTo could be replaced by just loading a grid model, or using lots of cube models in wireframe mode. Any ideas?