Terrain Sculpting and Object Manipulation Tool

Developed over several weeks, using a DirectX 11 and MFC framework provided by Abertay university, this tool for scene editing contains the following features:

• 3D camera movement with 'Unity-style' controls
• Multiple object selection and deselection, with highlighting in wireframe mode
• Can focus on one or more selected objects with a hotkey, and use an orbital camera mode on the center of the selection
• Object manipulation with mouse drag controls
  • Hotkeys are used to constrain edits to a single axis, using the most dominant drag direction, with another hotkey for allowing a third axis to be edited
  • Position, rotation and scale can be manipulated
  • Scale can be changed uniformly or asymmetrically
• An object inspector allows for manual changes to object attributes, including model and texture loading
  • User does not need to enter a full path name or file type, just the identifier
• Objects can be copied and pasted to duplicate them
• New objects can be created from a drop-down menu
• Objects can be deleted
• Terrain sculpting
  • Raise terrain
  • Carve/lower terrain with a hotkey
  • Create plateaus at a defined height with a hotkey
  • Optimised for fast performance
  • Settings dialogue box that allows the following variables to be altered
    • Brush size - defines size of area affected
    • Height change amount - brush strength, how steep the edit is
    • Plateau height - how tall created plateaus are
  • Undo/redo controls for changes made
• Toolbar buttons and numeric hotkeys to change 'tool mode' for using different features