Plugin ideas

[Marcello]

Hi guys,

I might suggest some stuff here that is too hard to do or takes too much time. It's just that I came across http://liquidrockgames.blogspot.com/200 ... chive.html and read some stuff I really like.

These guys are building a POD kinda race game (anyone remembers that game?). They seem to be building their own tools along the way. One of those functionalities is the abilty to paint 3D grass and pebbles and stuff.

1. Painting models
I was wondering how hard it is to paint models in a Blender file. Would it be possible to write a plug in that duplicates models while dragging the mouse. Ideally adjusting their position based on an underlying mesh (sorta snap function). I could imagine settings like spacing, randomized size, etc. This would make it easy to position plants, stones, grass, rubbish etc.

2. Standard objects (stairs, chairs)
How it could work: select a mesh (should have certain size restrictions) and that mesh is automatically used to make a ladder. the same could work for stairs, where the object is automatically placed along a selected or names curve or line.

Chairs and benches the same deal. Maybe even by simple naming conventions (objectname_chair, objectname_bench, objectname_ladder).

Am I making things to complex here, or could this really help novice writers to get things done more quickly?

Hope to hear some ideas or other comments.

[Lontahv]

I think being able to set surfaces to be covered in a certain model would be very useful. For instance, if you had a grass-leaf model you could set everything with material <X> to "sprout" this model along the host object's normal. It wouldn't be too hard either to have the grass also work with the host surface's stencil or alpha-paint. The painting part sounds kind of hard to stick into Blender. Maybe though you could set up a material-layer for the duplis to be bound with and then use a stencil to control the region of this texture.

Probably Blender's internal dupliverts couldn't be used for this. The math shouldn't be too hard for making something similar.