R: Rejected

This is a really open ended kind of request, and I usually put WAY more thought into stuff before throwing it out there.

I was using the Spore Creature Creator demo, and was really impressed by the selection of swappable parts, the way they play with the stock animations, etc., and the final results. The characters do share similar visual quality, but the interaction method is so simple it's ridiculous.

This got me thinking that it "sure would be nice" if there was an open source, or alternative type of version of this, based in something more along the lines of Kineme Parametric shapes or OpenCL Meshes.

It would be really_cool, to have a qtz based/integrated app that worked with an Interaction method type paradigm, but ramped up (basically, very similar to Spore Creature Creator), to "edit/create" what are actually qtz's that consist of linked parametric shapes and textures that can be edited into animated characters, vehicles, trees, etc. Then, those macro qtz creatures could be incorporated into other qtz's.

You would have a "shape" menu where you pull off typical body part shapes, then a texture interface, a demo "walk around mode" etc. The thing that is potentially interesting about going this route, is that QC has the kind of extensibility to write shapes from scratch, and has rich existing texturing tools.

So, this would basically be like a shell QC interface that writes qtz based assets, and animations might have to happen with a unique interface/plugin. So, I'm not really talking about writing to an existing 3D model format, as I am having an interface that is actually constructing qtz's via Viewer mode.

To be clear, I know that "characters" can be built (done it plenty),, it's just not obvious for people to do, and maybe it makes sense to rig something up so that this kind of thing doesn't have to be done from scratch every time.

I know this isn't trivial, but I think it would be a good progression of K3D, or maybe just related to.

.... and that says it all ;-)

Copying/paste/delete/duplicate, etc, actions on items in the Viewer get pushed to what's going on in the Editor. This is pretty darn standard in many graphics engines.

Too ambitious for a plugin?

It would be nice to have a way to build multiple compositions. maybe a CLI like quartzcrystal? Thanks

This could be done with scripting or by stringing patches together in certain instances, but my want is for conditional/logic patch or patches that have addable inputs. This seems like it would have been obvious for those patches, and it's something that I've thought of for a long time, without ever thinking to mention.

Now, the crazy take on this would be to have something where you could write in conditional and boolean logic statements in plain logic statements, kind of like Hypercard/Hypertalk.

Just some thoughts...

It would be convenient to be able to "get" the image that appears at the output of a mesh port tooltip, and be able to render that directly to a Billboard/Sprite, whatever.

The output of a mesh tooltip shows an image (aberrant for the data type), of a post transformed mesh (distinctly different from "get texture" which just removes grabs the texture from the pipeline).

I'm marking this is started/inactive since there's been previous discussion of supplying tooltip info in a structure, or getting namespace info. I'm tagging this as a structure tools thing.

I know that mesh port is "undocumented", but it seems like the mechanism that provides tooltip images is probably well documented... I just don't know if that can be transferred into a full resolution image.

Also, there are tons of "namespace" things that would be great to be able to grab from structures that aren't actually "part" of a structure, and we can't do anything to get at them for making logic decisions.