Scene designer

General Discussion
#1

Hello,

I am fairly new to panda and the one thing I didn’t find is a good scene designer. Other engines come with great and easy scene design tools. What scene design tools would people recommend for scene editing in Panda. I don’t mean modelling tools like blender or maya but a real scene designer.

I searched the forums but everybody is pointing to a 3d modeller and not a realy scene designer. Hope someone can point me to a good and easy one.

Thanks,

Jeroen

#2

Panda doesn’t have such scene designer at the moment. But it is not a big problem, since you can use any 3D modeler for this purpose. For example, you can create the full scene in Blender and then export it into egg file for use in Panda3D.

#3

I know that you can create them with blender and other modeler software. But I mean a real scene editor… More something like the one in the gamebryo engine.

#4

clooner, no one needed such a scene design in the past. I do space games, other people have done puzzle games. Toow town has their undocumented scene editor but its int he CVS. The scene software for a generic panda game has to be able to do much more then a scene editor for say FPS,RPG or an RTS game.

#5

It’s not that very hard to make a quick’n’dirty editor in panda. I also use that approach for my game.

#6

I wonder how well QuArK would work with Panda?

#7

Well, it looks like there’s some sort of python interface in Quark. If you’re determined enough you could write a script to get Quark’s data out in some format readable by Panda. But out of the box I don’t think it will work very well. If I recall correctly the way quake editors export levels are quite a bit different from how Panda does things.

#8

well it is possible to dissasemble quake levels. but you have to keep in mind that quark was made for quake levels. which are all BSP based. including level compilers for it.there are many ways to get a level out of it. but i think best would be to take an existing opensource map2bsp compiler and modify it so it will output an egg files. it’s not unproblematic since BSP-like structures arent well handled in panda. guess you would need to take the resulting egg file and convert its internal structure into an octree-based one.
quite some ammount of work i’d guess. but not impossible. the result would match the look of the same as in a quake-based engine(more recent one. not those 8bit things^^).

#9

Hi,

What I have done it is to use Blender as scene editor. Blender has a python API that allows you to access to almost all functions of Blender. So, I have created some python scripts that run inside Blender for doing whatever I want. For example, create triggers, create walkable areas, connect to scenes (exits), etc.
The idea is the script:

  • Exports the whole scene to an .egg file
  • Creates a special object; the ground object for walking over it, and exports to an .egg file
  • Creates a special object; the water object (if exists) and exports
  • Trigger; It looks for models with a concrete name like ‘tri_’ for triggers and it creates the python code for the trigger
  • Exits; the same as triggers
  • Creates a panda python file for loading the .egg files
  • And so on
    You get the idea.
    I hope this help.
    Regards.
    Alberto
#10

That would be nice indeed for those that need this feature.

Keep up the good work and let us know how its going :slight_smile:

cheers
nl

#11

Well how about sharing this with the rest of use blender and panda users

#12

Hi,

Sorry for the delay I have not read your answer.
I have no problem with sharing the scripts but they are
specific for my game/demo. You must take into account
that the blender scripts create .egg files and a python file,
which must be used with the game engine code. So, in order
to be useful for someone, they must be tunned for another
purposes.
I have a design document, some blender scenes and the
required scripts. However, they are very long and I do not have
a web/ftp server. Do you know where I could leave the files?
As alternative, if you have a web server, I could send the files
by email and you could put them in your web server page.
Regards.
Alberto

#13

Is Panda3DProjects ready for that kind of upload yet?

#14

It is. It has been for long, and it’s open to anyone who wants to use it.

#15

It sounds interesting indeed.
gamasutra.com/features/20040 … or%201.jpg < so does this :wink:…level designer used to make ToonTown levels and a shame its not available for end users of panda.

Maybe someone will resurrect it :wink:

cheers
nl

#16

yea, I could use something like that in what I have been playing around with.
looks pretty useful

#17

neighborlee, joeldg, it is available for end-users actually :wink:
panda3d.org/apiref.php?page=LevelEditor

#18

Yes but all the functions are undocumented