se1:Basic Navigation
From SeriousEngine.com
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Contents |
Purpose
This tutorial will show you how to get into a map and move about, zoom in and out, pan, fly around, select objects, switch selection modes, various movement and alignment options, etc. This is in fact enough material for an entire tutorial, because it covers advanced movement as well as the basics. Thus even the fairly experienced user may perhaps find something useful in here, lower down towards the bottom of the page. This tutorial also skims over the different Viewport presets. For an in depth of how to tweak your viewports, see this section of the A Neophyte's Guide To The Serious Editor Interface.
Moving in the 2D Views
First of all, you need to have a map open. To keep things running spiffily, we'll not open one of the massive single player maps. Go to File=>Open, and select the map DesertTemple.wld, in your Serious Sam/levels/deathmatch folder. Alternately, you can double click on the Levels folder, in the Virtual Tree and then double click on the last map in the list, which is DesertTemple.wld.
Once the level is open, you should be presented with the standard 4 views: TOP, 3D, SIDE, FRONT. If you dont have this layout, make sure your num lock is turned on and press the '0' on the numeric keypad. This should set you to the basic 4 views. Now, you may not see much in your viewports, because the camera has not started right where all the geometry is. So, we have to zoom out and look for it.
Zooming
The space bar is your key for moving. When you move the mouse over a viewport, and hold down the spacebar, you can then move about by clicking with your mouse buttons. Go to the upper left viewport, the TOP view. Hold down spacebar, and then hold down your right mouse button (RMB) at the same time, and drag it upwards, toward the top of your viewport. A few things happen when you do this. First, your view starts to zoom out. Second, all the other viewports also zoom out, in unison. Even the 3D one. Also, when your mouse reaches the top of the viewport, you stop zooming out. If you want to keep zooming out, you need to let go of the RMB, while still holding the space bar, and then start at the bottom of the viewport again and RMB drag upwards again. As you repeat this you will zoom further and further out. Sometimes you will accidentally right-click without holding space bar first, and a right-click context menu will pop up. Click on the title bar at the top of the screen, and it goes away.
Now you get to zoom in. It's the same, except you drag down instead of up. You can zoom back in to where you were. If you keep zooming in, you'll notice by looking in the 3d window, that you zoom in slower and slower until finally you can't zoom in any further. This is because you have zoomed all the way in to your viewer Focus. We will talk about Focus in a minute here.
Panning
First lets Pan. Zoom back out a bit, so you are right about where you started. There are two ways to pan. First, you can pan with your left mouse button. Try this in each of the viewports. Hold spacebar, and then drag with left mouse button. This works in the 3D viewport too, as does your RMB Zoom. You can also pan side-to-side while you are zooming with your right mouse button. This is actually kind of annoying most of the time.
Moving in the 3D View
Now, we're ready to move around in the 3D viewport. It would help if we could see more of the map, so lets hit the Reset Viewer button. It's on the Projections Toolbar, and it's the first button, a little cyan grid with a cross and a red dot in the middle. Depending on how far you are zoomed in or out, you may be close or far away from the buildings, but you should see something there. If you are far away, SPACE + RMB zoom in. If you are too close, SPACE + RMB zoom out.
Rotating
Its time to rotate the view. This only works in the 3D window. Lets make the 3D window bigger, since we're going to be working in it for a bit here. Hit 6 on the numeric keypad, and you should get one big pretty 3D view. Zoom out a bit, so that you can see the whole temple, and some of the sand around it. Now, hold space bar, and hold both mouse buttons simultaneously and drag left or right. Your view should rotate around your focus, which is the center of the map. Now try moving the mouse up and down a bit, and your view should rotate vertically as well.
Changing your Focus
Now, its all very well to be able to rotate around the center of the world, but what if you want to rotate around something else? You need to move your Focus to some other spot. One way to do this is to Pan. Pan your view left or right a ways. Now rotate your view again, and you will notice that you are rotating around a new point.
There are other ways to move your focus too. A very handy way is to select something and center on it. To do this, go into Entity mode (press E). The color swatch on the status bar at the bottom of the screen should be blue. Now, rotate your view till you can see a palm tree. Click on the palm tree, and a red arrow should appear above it. If you don't see the red arrow, make sure Selection Rendering is activated. Now, hit C on your keyboard, and your focus should center on the palm tree. Test this by rotating your view around the tree, and zooming in on it a bit. You can also press A, which is similar to C, except it zooms you in really close to the object. You can move about your map using these tricks in combination with view panning. But there is also another trick for changing your Focus.
Hold down Control, Spacebar, and then click your left mouse on something once. Your focus will move to where you clicked, and zoom in a bit. If you CTRL + SPACE + LMB click on the same spot again, you will zoom in further. If you do this on a different wall or object, when you're already zoomed in pretty far, you will end up way too close to whatever you clicked on. Luckily, CTRL + SPACE + RMB does the same thing, except zooms you out. So, if you need to put your focus somewhere and zoom out a bit, use that combo. Because of how quick these both are, they are a much better way to zoom in and out than SPACE + RMB. Try rapidly zooming out, by holding CTR + SPACE and then clicking your RMB several times quickly. Then do it with the LMB to zoom in fast. Cool, huh?
Flying
Yes, in the 3D View you can also fly about. This is actually most people's favorite way to move in the 3D window, because it's so intuitive, even if it is a bit slower than some of the other tricks. Position your mouse over the 3D view, and press Escape. Now you can look around freely, as if you were in the game. You can press the RMB to fly forward, and the LMB to fly backward. If your mouse has a wheel, you can scroll the wheel up and down to fly faster or slower. This is really cool, but unfortunately if you don't have a wheel, there is no way that I know of to change how fast you can fly. Press Escape again to get out of Fly mode. While in fly mode, you can also press the arrow keys or the WASD keys to fly forward and backward and pan left and right (think strafing). You can press SPACE to move vertically (think swim upwards, or jump).
Selection Modes
The status bar at the bottom of the screen displays your current selection mode. These modes are CSG(red), Entity(Blue), Sector(Green), Polygon(Yellow), and Vertex(Black). You can access all of these modes via hotkeys. Entity mode is 'E', Sector mode is 'S', Polygon mode is 'P', and vertex mode is '.'. To get into CSG mode, press the Enter on your numeric keypad. You can freely switch between all the modes except CSG mode. If you get into CSG mode by accident, and want to get out of it without doing a CSG, you can press the '.' on the numeric keypad, and then pick whatever mode you want. For more on CSG mode, see a CSG Tutorial
Moving Objects
Dragging Objects
Let's move some stuff around, here. Dont' worry, as long as you DO NOT click save when you exit the file, you wont mess anything up. Press 0 on the numeric keypad, to go into the default 4 views. Go into Entity mode, by pressing E. Now, select something, perhaps one of those big honky rainbow checkerboards with the start flag above it. Hit C to center on it, and zoom in or out if you have to, to get a good view of it. In the top view, hold down Control and drag with the left mouse button, to move the object. You can also CTRL + RMB, and this moves it up and down, you can see that in the other views. However, its generally more accurate to just go to a side or front view, and drag it up and down with CTRL + LMB, than to use CTRL + RMB in the top view.
Rotating Objects
You can also do CTRL + LMB + RMB, to... you guessed it: Rotate the object! This is a very precise way to rotate, however, it sometimes gets a little funky. A better way to rotate an object is to hit Tab (for 90 degree rotations) or to use the arrow keys.
Position and Rotation Type-ins
You can also type in rotation or position coordinates, via the Info Window. Hit Q to Pull it up if it isn't already. Click on the Position tab, and you have X (left and right) Y (up and down) and Z (forward and back) type-ins, as well as Heading (rotate left or right) Pitch (rotate up or down) and Banking (roll over). All position measurements are in meters (a meter is approximately 3 feet, a little more, for all you americans). All rotation measurements are in degrees (360 of those in a full circle, for all of you grade school drop-outs). Be sure to hit Enter after typing in these fields, or the changes won't "stick". Also make sure your mouse is over the Position Window when you hit enter, or weird things happen (you go into CSG mode).
Teleporting Objects
What this does is instantly move objects from point a to point b. Select something, now move your mouse wherever you want it to be moved to, and CTRL + Double LMB click. The selected object will instantly pop to whatever spot You double clicked. This is best done in the 3D window most of the time. You can actually use any of the movement commands in the 3D view, but it's harder to be accurate. CTRL + LMB moves an object left, right, up, and down. CTRL + RMB moves and object towards you or away. CTRL + LMB + RMB rotates, but it can get VERY messy in the 3D view, so I suggest you at least never do this, even if you do the other two in the 3D view.
Aligning Objects
There are several ways to align objects in the more recent builds of Serious Editor. These can be accessed by selecting an object in Entity mode, and then right clicking the object and choosing an option from the Position and Orientation==>Align menu. What you do, is select the object you want to align, then hold down shift and select the object you want to align it to. If you select multiple objects, they will all align to the last object selected. the different kinds of alignments available on the align menu are described below in brief.
- Align X - Aligns all objects to the target's position on the X axis.
- Align Y - Aligns all objects to the target's position on the Y axis.
- Align Z - Aligns all objects to the target's position on the Z axis.
- Align Heading - Rotates all objects to match the target's Heading.
- Align Pitch - Rotates all objects to match the target's Pitch.
- Align Banking - Rotates all objects to match the target's Banking.
Go on, try it on a whole bunch of objects at once, its pretty cool. For example, select one palm tree, then rotate it all funky. Now select all the other trees with Shift and finally select your funky tree last, and align Heading, Align Pitch, and Align Banking. Voila! Aligning is good if you get some object moved or rotated just right, and you want some others to match it.
Navigation Pitfalls
There is one odd glitch that I ought to warn you about. In the 3D window, if you rotate your view all the way up or down to directly above or below your focus, it may get sort of stuck. You should avoid taking this vertical view, but if you do for some reason, and you find that you are suddenly stuck UPSIDE DOWN, there is a simple way to fix this. Just rotate your view vertically until you hit the point where you stick, then just move the mouse in the opposite direction and you should start coming down again, only this time right side up. It may take a few tries before you get it.
Now here is another pitfall, (yay!) and i'm not sure if it's a feature or a bug. If you are rotating your view, and you let go of both mouse buttons while still moving the view, you will continue to rotate the view with your mouse, even though you have no buttons or keys pressed. To get out of it, click a mouse button. To avoid this happening, stop rotating completely before letting go of the mouse buttons.
If you hit escape while hovering over a non-3d view, weird things happen. Just press escape again to get out of fly mode.
In fly mode, at least on my mouse, if I click the wheel instead of scrolling it, a bunch of the buildings disappear. If this happens, just click it again and they come back.
Now that you're thru with this, I suggest you try the other basic tutorials found on the main tutorial page.
(originally published on www.worldspawn.org, published here with permission of author)
Leo "LSD" De Bruyn lsd@worldspawn.org
