DeleD Community Edition

[Vox]

Hello, I'm new to DeleD but not to 3D modeling and programming. When
I first came here 72 hours ago I was a bit confused. I was looking for
a tutorial that would show me how to use everything by example; like
the -How to create a *- guides/tutorials you see with tools like Anim8tor,
MilkShape, and various other Modelers, World Builder etc...

I can now do all the basic stuff since reading the documentation the first
night I was useing the tool,48 hours ago, but I am still confused on various
things that are ether not covered, or not covered enouph. Instead of
writing paragraphs, I'll make a list of things that I personally think would
help new commers quickly render satisfiying results, and Help everyone
have a better understanding of the tool.

1. Provide more solid documentation. Although I learned all the basics I am
   still clueless to things such as Texturing Models, and Lighting with more
   than one point light in the Light version, it seems bugged.
   
2. Look into the Lighting Bug! It fails to render when I use it at a certain height
   above the grid, and it has a pixelated look when used while another light is
   already active at any distance.
   
3. More documentation on animation of things such as doors, models etc...
   
4. Fix the texture config file in DeleD Light! I tryed to fix myne, but no go. The
   problem is that only a few textures from each folder/category show in the
   menu widget. I added values like you would with a .ini or .conf, but it didn't
   help, for example walls only shows about 3 or 4 textures when they're
   5-6 in the folder.
   
5. More stuff on hollowing buildings and making interiors. A guide on window
   trasparency too, like alpha channel kinda so you could see a model moving
   through it. Also improve the existing tutorials! I seen a complaint answered
   about this before suggesting that the person read the manual. I read it, and
   still have no clue how to select the two sides of the wall.
   
6. Tutorial on Beveling/ Unioning and Subtracting, so we have a better understanding
   for modeling small models and such.
   
7. Documentation on SkyBoxs or Sky mapping if possible at all within the editor
   

That's it! If I'm missing something, or put something on the list that is properly
documented tell me.

[Paul-Jan]

Hi Vox,

Welcome to these forums, and thanks for the feedback! Let me go through these remarks one by one:

1. You are absolutely right, we are lacking both extensive documentation and tutorials. We are aware of this (and have been for a while), and working on a structured way of making this a shared effort of both the community, and us (the developers). Writing documentation is a lot of work, and any time spend on writing docs is not spend improving the actual product, so we need this to be both efficient and effective. Stay tuned In the meanwhile, if you see room for improvement in the current tutorials written by other members of our community, feel free to fill in the gap of course!

2. Could you elaborate on this one please? If you did already do so elsewhere I might not have seen it yet, otherwise I'd like more information on how to reproduce the problem, even screenshot perhaps, in order to solve this problem. Do note that the Lite version has a very limited (and fixed) lightmap resolution, so that might explain some of the things you are experiencing.

3. DeleD is a static modeler, it doesn't do animation. Animations of doors and such has to be handled by the final renderer (game engine, etc).

4. Ok, a little misunderstanding here. There are two concepts with in DeleD, the Material Picker (the thing docked on the left hand side of your editor, what you refer to as "menu widget") and the Material Editor (icon in the toolbar). The Material Editor is what you use for managing the set of materials as used in the current scene (i.e. where you select textures from your folders, and turn them into single or multi-layered materials). The Material Picker is used for picking materials from that selection. The "3 or 4" textures you see in the wall section is simply the default set of materials incuded in every scene (for convenience). There should be no need to "edit config files". Ever.

5. Yeah, see (1). To select an object, shift-click it. To select polyongs, first select objects, then go into polygon mode (p) and shift-ctrl-click to add. I am not sure if this is what you meant though (what do you mean by "the 2 sides" )?

6. See (1). Lite version doesn't support the subtraction CSG operation.

7. Skyboxes are not supported a.t.m. They are on our todo-list, but with low priority:. rendering the skybox usually is the responsibility of the final rendering solution (game engine, etc.), it does not contribute much to the actual modeling process.

Again, thank you very much for your input! If you'd like to elaborate more on issues 2 and 4 (and other issues as well of course!), that would be great!

[Vox]

For 2; I'll post snap shots later today in this post to show you what I
mean.

For 4; I was refering to the Left<-->Right scrolling menu on the left of the
main(middle) section of the Interface. I scroll through, and it dosen't show
all the textures that are inside the folders. I thought by adding them to that
file(Default.DML) They would show, but they didnt. I'll look into the problem
more today, and see if I can't find a way to have them show for efficientsy
reasons.

[Paul-Jan]

Ad 4: Yeah, we are talking about the same thing here, that's the material picker. You have to use the material editor if you want to select the materials that show up there.

[Vox]

Yea, I fixed the Texture and Lighting problem yesterday. I couldn't post cause I was
conserving my dialup bandwidth for a 180MB file I was downloading; took me about
6 1/2 hours.