Material Editor Prototype

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, mostly because I've been quite busy at work, but also because I reached a point in my work on the Light PrePass renderer where I need to sleep on it for a bit so I can then clean the code and improve what I have (this is how I do most of my refactor ... write stuff, stop and think aboutit, refactor/remove code/make it nice ... then rince, repeat).

In the meantime, I started working on the future Material Editor that I will need when the renderer is up ad running. I want a node-based editor a la UnrealEd or other graphical shader editors. And having this king of graph editor would be handy for other stuff like animation trees, visual level scripting tool (a la Unreal Kismet), state machines, etc ...

My toolchain is written mostly in C# (I'll develop the link Engine/Editor in a future post) so writing GUI is not as bad as the usual C++/MFC nightmare. Moreover, I found a superb 2D drawing library called Piccolo.NET a few years ago and its concept of Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) is exactly what I needed for this project. After a few days of work, I have a first version of the GUI running with some underlying graph model behind it. It supports Undo/Redo via a bunch of undoable commands that modify the graph Model. Modifications of the Model generate events that the UI hooks onto and mirror.

I'll give more details about the internals when the code design gets a bit more stable as it is still in early stages, but I am really pleased with the result so far.

Time to conclude with a screenshot :)