White Box Tool Feedback

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Hey everyone,

The 1.25 release of Lumberyard introduced the White Box Tool (an Editor feature for creating simple level geometry while prototyping).

There’s a lot left to do but we wanted to get what we had in front of people as early as possible and would love to hear your feedback. Please tell us what you like/don’t like, what you feel is missing and would like to see added or any other issues/bugs/ideas.

We’re trying to gather as much feedback as possible and will be using it to help drive future development.

Thank you very much for your time! We look forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,

Tom

asked 4 years ago166 views
28 Answers
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Hi @REDACTEDUSER

💡 My Idea is For the future, Please Lumberyard team develop this tool a lot, I think include the possibility of making 3D Characters and Animation Rigs and Unwrap Map 3D Character Texture as well with White Box Tool :star_struck: 😍

I saw white box tool in this video 👇 It is Good for now 😎 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV2tm19FmYI

answered 4 years ago
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Everything is fine, but the boolean of the operation are just necessary... Such as addition, subtraction of geometry, etc Thank you, you're cool!

answered 4 years ago
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Thanks very much for your feedback @REDACTEDUSER

Yes boolean operations are awesome and we would love to add support for them in future. We have a few other bits and pieces we'd like to polish in Sketch Mode but as soon as that's done adding support for intersection/union/substraction is very much on the list!

Thanks for the confirmation that this is an important feature!

Thanks again for checking out the tool.

Cheers!

Tom

answered 4 years ago
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If it continues to improve. It can compete with Blender. Since it is modeling in realtime like eevee does in Blender.

answered 4 years ago
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Hi @REDACTEDUSER

Thank you very much for the feedback. The plan is definitely for the tool to continue improving! :slight_smile:

Whether we reach the sophistication of a tool like Blender is another story. Our focus is on the tool being used for simple level design primarily. We do know however there's still a ton of useful functionality we're missing. The plan was (and still is!) to get this out early and then build it in the open with the engagement and participation of our customers and community.

Any thoughts or ideas you have or pain points you've experienced with the current tool please let us know.

Thanks again!

Tom

answered 4 years ago
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I finally got home and I worked very hard with this tool. I would suggest working out the accuracy. That is, I want to say that when we do some kind of action with the geometry, we must see by how many centimeters or meters or degrees we shift, unfold or scale the polygon or edge or vertex. This is necessary to achieve high accuracy rates. Then light geometry will be very easy to do. At the moment, you can focus on the eye, that is, approximate indicators are obtained. And this is not very convenient

answered 3 years ago
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Hey @REDACTEDUSER

Thank you very much for the feedback, we really appreciate it!

Improved indicators around distance/measurement is a brilliant suggestion and something we're actively thinking about. We're trying to figure out the best way to build the tech to support such a system (there's some interestings ideas being kicked around :slight_smile:).

One option to use short-term is to enable grid snapping - all the editing that happens with the White Box Tool actually uses the same Manipulators under the hood as the new Viewport Interaction Model. Grid snapping should help, the only pain is you have to enter/leave Component Mode to enable/disable it (we're looking at addressing that soon too) but if you're going to stay in snapping mode for a while it's quite useful.

Thanks again for the feedback, it really helps! Any other suggestion/problems/ideas please let us know! :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Tom

answered 3 years ago
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Hello! I recorded a little gif asking what was really missing in white box. That is the exact coordinates. GIF is just a demonstration of what is needed. I use Modo software. I guess I only have two requests. This add sizes to any boolean of the operation and do bulow operations, but they are not necessary. You can do without them

Add precision first. It is important. And then it may be possible to completely abandon such programs as 3d max, modo, maya, blender, of course, for modeling and prototyping levels REMOVEDUPLOAD

answered 3 years ago
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What would also be cool is some adding and subtracting functionality between different whitebox entities. This is pretty typical of constructive solid geometry. And if you wanted to you could throw in some useful functions like "hollow" function which turns a block into a hollow cube of a certain thickness. I've found these functions very useful for prototyping levels with rooms.

answered 3 years ago
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Thanks very much for the gif @REDACTEDUSER

We have plans to add new submodes that allow more precise control over vertices/faces/edges etc.. using our existing manipulators. In the first preview version we've released we unfortunately didn't get to that as we wanted to focus on ideas around what we call 'Sketch Mode'. We wanted to minimise context switching and clicks to provide an immediate form of editing (just click and drag).

It would be great for more precise cases to be able to drop down to a more advanced mode where we show a full manipulator that you can control just as you want like in the gif. It's very much on the roadmap :slight_smile: Other things are winning out on the priority list at the moment but I can assure you we'll get back to it!

answered 3 years ago
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You're totally right - constructive solid geometry (CSG) is super cool and we have plans to integrate a form of it into White Box. Boolean operations are incredibly useful for level prototyping and we would love to add it. Most likely we'll have a sub-mode in White Box to support this with more contrained shapes to ensure the CSG operations perform efficiently. It's likely a little ways off but continues to be a much requested feature so we will be looking at it for sure! :slight_smile: In the meantime thanks for your patience and do keep giving is feedback, it really helps! Thanks!

answered 3 years ago
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I have another suggestion. Of course you don't need whitebox to be like, some feature full modeler or anything, but it would be useful if there was a basic way to assign UV maps. Like a basic tool to assign certain polygons to positions on the texture. Perhaps a separate window pops up and you can have a basic cube unwrap and the ability to move around and cut edges. There's a similar tool in Godot for basically UV mapping polygons.

answered 3 years ago
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Awesome suggestion, that has come up before too. It's something that's super useful and is a must for a tool like this. It's 100% on the list :) Apologies it's not going to be around the next corner but it hopefully won't be too long to wait. Thanks for your patience!

answered 3 years ago
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Boolean operations - especially, or at least subtraction - should be definitely the next no. 1 thing on that list.

I also agree that UV tools would be useful.

(OT/BTW: Is UV manipulation in general already exposed to runtime manipulation? I.e. to move textures on the mesh around in RT?)

answered 3 years ago
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For sure! :slight_smile: It's on the list and something we'll be investigating soon. Thanks for letting us know this is important to you.

I'm afraid it isn't with White Box but it might be possible to do with some other Lumberyard components (maybe with some tweaks to the Mesh Component?) but I'm not sure off of the top of my head sorry.

Thanks again!

Tom

answered 3 years ago
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[quote="tom-hh, post:16, topic:9153"] I’m afraid it isn’t with White Box but it might be possible to do with some other Lumberyard components (maybe with some tweaks to the Mesh Component?) but I’m not sure off of the top of my head sorry. [/quote]

Oh, I didn't mean with White Box anyways. That's why I marked it with OT and with White Box it wouldn't make too much sense I think.

But I think I've read something about this is the manual over the weekend regarding mesh-components. So I think this is indeed already possible. Not 100% sure, but quite.

answered 3 years ago
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Awesome got you! Best of luck, I hope you can find the answer you're looking for :)

answered 3 years ago
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I think support for adding edge loops would be great

answered 3 years ago
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Thanks for the feedback @REDACTEDUSER

There's some rather limited support for something approximating edge-loops by using hiding edges in Sketch Mode and then restoring different edges in Restore Mode. You can't yet define new edges on their own though. If you have an example or link to show exactly what you'd like to do that would be super helpful.

Thanks!

Tom

answered 3 years ago
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https://youtu.be/ZZ7_-uTqoYo?t=70

I think this video from 1:10 to 1:25 shows it well.

answered 3 years ago
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Hi everyone, This is great feedback. Don't be afraid to keep giving suggestions for the white box tool!

Keep them coming! Thanks!

answered 3 years ago
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Another big thing is if scaling works as expected, currently the white box always scales uniformly

answered 3 years ago
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After some time with WBT I really miss multiselection. Extruding multiple faces at once really would save a lot of time. A lot of things are impossible without it.

Mirror and merge would also be helpful and should be easy to implement. Bevel would be great, too.

answered 3 years ago
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Aah I see exactly what you mean, thanks for the link! :)

answered 3 years ago
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Aah this is tricky... I don't think we will support non-uniform scale for the White Box Tool as it makes editing really difficult. The Manipulators you use to interact with the tool operate in the local space of the Entity/Component and if you introduce non-uniform scale they won't behave as expected. We've encountered lots of issues with non-uniform scale in the past (especially when it comes to Entity hierarchies) and to be honest in my opinion it's best to just avoid it and instead use the available editing operations. That's my take anyway :P

answered 3 years ago
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Hi @REDACTEDUSER

Thanks for the feedback! Multi-selection is a great shout and it should be quite easy to do. Mirror is a really nice feature as well. Merge is trickier (gets into Boolean operations) but it's something we do have planned for the future.

Thanks again for checking out the tool and giving us feedback! Much appreciated :slight_smile:

Cheers!

Tom

answered 3 years ago
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This feedback is great. If you are using the WBT often, DM me and if you want, we can do a Q&A watch session with you so I can get feedback from you.

I am apart of the Lumberyard Research Team.

Thanks

answered 3 years ago
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add(sentence): After creating the geometry - centering the pivot relative to the geometry

answered 3 years ago

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