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ClayWorks 3.0 alpha test

Welcome to the Clayworks 3.0 alpha test. This is still very early days for this program but I'm happy enough with it's current state to release it for testing purposes. First things first, these are the system requirements for this version of Clayworks. Future versions will be more forgiving as I add support for legacy graphics cards and also when I bother to enumerate texture formats and so on. For now, I'm making certain assumptions about what your hardware is capable of.

Minimum spec

32megs ram
T&L capable 3d graphics card (geforce 1+) (n.b. it might work on less but at the moment, it'll be slow
DirectX 7 or greater (pixel shaders will just have to wait)
Running in 16bit or 32bit graphics mode, other modes will not work at the moment.
300 mhz machine.
Windows 2k, 9x/ME or Windows XP. I haven't personally tested XP but people tell me it works!

Recommened spec

Ram enough for pixar
GeForce 3 or greater.
DirectX 7 or greater.
Running in 16bit (565) or 32bit (8888) graphics mode, other modes will not work at the moment.
As fast a machine as you can lay your hands on.
Windows 2k

Clayworks is a modelling program and is, as such, a bit of a resource hog. Although it won't eat your memory as much as say, 3dsmax, maya or softimage, when you've added 100 modifiers to an object, you'll find it's eaten a lot of ram. I will make Clayworks more memory efficient in the future but for now, keep that in mind.

Using Clayworks

Clayworks has an 'unique' interface but I've tried to keep to normal UI conventions so that people won't get confused when using it. The UI currently lacks a few things that you might take for granted such as keyboard shortcuts, dockable toolbars and so on. These issues will be addressed in the near future but I'm currently more interested in getting all the modelling tools up to speed. One thing you might notice is that it is fast. Unlike many skinned apps, Clayworks has a nice, solid and fast interface (heh, on the machines I've tested it on at least).

Starting out: Navigation

Clayworks has several methods of moving around the scene but by far the easiest to use is the shortcut key method. By holding down the ctrl key whilst the mouse is over a 3d view and moving the mouse in and out, you'll zoom the view. The orthograph views are all locked together when zooming but the perspective view is not. Holding down the shift key will allow you to pan around that view and holding them both together allows you to rotate in the perspective view; that feature is locked out in the orthographic views as I found it annoying.

Creating a shape

  Clayworks has two basic modes of opperation; 'Create' and 'Modifiy' . When you start Clayworks, you'll notice one large quad-view for drawing (2)and rendering and two panels to the right of the screen (3, 4). Along the top, you'll find the tab box for switching the current operating mode (1).
   You'll start off in the 'create' mode and you'll see a drop box in the top left that contains all the primtives that can be created in this release of Clayworks.
To create a shape, select the one you want from the menu and then either click and drag the shape in one of the three orthographic views or simple click once to create a small (unit sized) version of that shape.
   Once you've created the shape, you'll notice that the node editor window (4) now contains some tools for editing the parameters of the shape you created. You can always edit these paremters again by finding the correct node in either the 'Graph' or 'Tree' tabs of the schematic window (3).

Editing the shape

Now that you have a simple shape on the screen, we can try editing it. Clayworks doesn't have so many modifiers built in at this stage but they'll grow in number with subsequent released. To start modifying the object, click the select tab in the top left hand corner of the screen (1). You should now see four drop down boxes and each one of these controls a different aspect of the selection and modification process. The leftmost dropbox controls the current selection level. By this I mean the elements that will be selected; Vertices, Edges, Polygons or Objects Currently, only the selection of vertices, polygons and objects are implemented.
  The next drop box controls the selection geometry or the shape you'll use to create the selection. The drop box contains options for Rectangle, Lassoo, Circle and Point Click. Currently only rectangle and point click are implemented. The rectangle mode allows you to draw a rectangle over the region you want to select whereas the point click mode lets you select individual elements (such as polygons) by clicking on them. The later mode can be used in any window but the former is currently limited to the orthographic views. Future versions will let you selections (and create objects) in any view, be it orthograph or perspective.
  Next up we have the modifier list. This is where you choose what kind of action you are going to perform on the elements you have selected. The default mode is 'stretch'. When you've selected a group of polygons, you should see a bounding box around the selected region. Moving the mouse over the corner widgets will highlight them, indicating that it's safe to click and hold down the mouse to make a modification. As soon as you do this, a stretch modifier will be added to the object. Clicking the edges of the bounding box will allow you to perform a translation.
  Other modifiers currently implemented include rotate (bit buggy at the moment, still trying to make a really intuative rotation tool), extrude, detatch, copy and delete. The modifiers after rotate are performed immediately and then take you back to whatever manipulator you were using; unfortunately, the node panels for these modifiers are therefore not shown on creation and you'll have to dive into the scene tree (3) in order to find the modifier and adjust it's properties. This isn't very intuative and will be addressed in later versions. When you try to modify an object, make sure that the manipulator's handles are highlighted, otherwise you'll just make another selection and you'll loose the old one. Although the undo feature isn't implemented yet, it is possible to get rid of unwanted modifications by going into the graph view (3) and deleting the offending yellow box. Don't worry though, thanks to the way the modifications are handled in clayworks, it won't be hard to implement an infinite undo/redo feature.

Known bugs/problems

Just so we don't repeat ourselves, here's a list of known issues with this release of Clayworks. These are things I already know about and am working to solve.

Maximize buttons don't work on main panels.
All othrographic views are locked on zoom
The 'edge' select modes does not function yet.
Using the 'apply material' modifier has no effect if selected from the menu, use the 'apply' button from the material node panel instead.
3D perspective view has a quirk with rotation; the 'orbit' of rotation doesn't move when panning the camera.
The extrude tool has a bug with single level extrudes
The node panel doesn't have a slider; some controls aren't visible unless you resize it
The 'graph' view lacks any means of panning. It'll have 3dview style controls and a set of scroll bars later.
You can't bring up new floating node panels, these panels are stuck in one single view. This will change soon.
The rotate widget is just plain crazy, don't worry, it's being worked on.
When creating an extrusion, deleting polygons, copying polygons or detaching them, the node panel for that modifier doesn't appear automatically. It will, later on but for now, you can find it by looking in the 'tree' or 'graph' schematics.
You can rename nodes, yet.
Clayworks won't come to the front of a window stack unless you click on the main title bar
Clayworks windows, moved behind normal MS windows will appear to 'stutter' if the Clayworks window is smaller than the MS window.
Bump mapping goes mad if you don't have hardware transformation and lighting on your card.
Older cards might have problems as the software 3d engine is offline for now.
The user interface lacks dockable toolbars and some familiar keyboard shortcuts; they're both on the way.
Animation isn't included, yet.
The modifier list is small; this is to keep the feature set small for this test. Adding new modifiers is easy and you'll be able to add your own when the SDK is finished.
You can load many texture file formats but jpg just loads a black rectangle the same size as the image. I'm still working on this image filter, have you seen how tough a jpg decoder is to code? :)
The scroll bars of the 'info box' don't work correctly.
The envmap material doesn't work; needs recoding.
The perlin noise texture looks strange if you attach it to a material. Add a palette to the noise function and it'll look ok. I'll get clay to add this automatically later.
Causing any 'infinite loops' with node references will probably crash the program. For instance, getting a tile texture or combination material to refer to themselves will crash the program rather ungracefully.
Both the wall builder and tile texture node types are not very useful; I created these as editors for specific games I've been writing and they might not do what you expect them to.
You can loose your selection if you're not careful where you click on the manipulators.
There's no undo/redo yet! (that really has to be sorted out)
You can't save on this test version; I don't know how I'm going to change the format before the final release so there's no point in letting you save files that may become redundant quickly. Besides, it's difficult to put a polygon cap on procedural objects.
The graph viewer is cool. It's also a complete mess. This tool shows the connections between nodes in the scene and this connectivity is the core of the future expansion of Clayworks. In the future, you'll be able to make and break connections in this view, creating a sort of visual programming language. However, at the moment it's only real purpose is to show me that the nodes and their connections are operating as they should and it's too badly organised to be of much use to anybody else. It's a bit like the hypergraph in maya and will be just as useful. Please be patient, that humble window will be a lot more impressive later on.
If you have an ATI rage pro, you'll probably have to run in 16bit colour mode due to the lack of video ram.

Right, any more things you find out, let me know and I'll add them to the list.
Clayworks is copyright 2002 Tim Lewis. I cannot be help responsible for any losses incurred while using this software.