I definitely like the approach of doing small incremental updates!
I’ve used a lot of graphics sw and just started using WM so this is based on what a green user experiences. Generally it’s very intuitive and quick to maneuver and I was able to create the type of terrain I wanted pretty quickly. I’m still learning all the device functionality so I’ll just leave UI comments.
Some UI suggestions:
Ability to swap UI left/right mouse buttons for pan/zoom. I switch between a lot of 3d software and it’s really nice to get them all consistent.
Ability to disable right mouse flipping views. (“toggle main view” button in left-nav makes more sense)
My workflow is generally that I’m in the Device Workflow 10% of my time (just working on connecting Devices), or I’m mainly in the 3D view and I double-click on the Device tree and tweak the settings while watching impact. Not sure if that’s the normal workflow but it works great for me. I wish in addition to showing the Device parameters, that it could also show the items you see when you right click on the device (disable, rename, bypass, etc).
In multi tile setups, ability to have output filenames append tile number.
Left side-bar should have dropdown to navigate to tile.
The UI in layout view and Layout Generator is very confusing.
The User Guide should PROMINENTLY note that the manual for Devices is separate.
Thanks for the kind words, and for your candid feedback! I think much of what you say is a good idea – and in some cases is already on a UI overhaul list.
I have a few clarifications I would like to hear more about:
Can you explain what you mean about appending tile number? In a tiled build, this occurs automatically.
Can you go into more detail about the things that you found immediately confusing about layout view/generators?
“In multi tile setups, ability to have output filenames append tile number”. - I have the Standard version. I’m guessing what I want is one of the features of the Pro version. I’m mostly working on with 9 1024 terrain tiles (3x3) and exporting raw16 to Unity. So my workflow is tweak to get the settings I want, then go to each tile, build the tile, rename the output from heightmap.r16 to something like 2_heightmap.r16, then go on to the next tile. So basically in Heightfield File Output, I’d like to specify the name as %n_heighmap.r16
“The UI in layout view and Layout Generator is very confusing”. - I bring up Layout generator, I click on Polygon, I click and make the polygon (so far so good). First problem - how do I get out of Polygon mode? (I’d expect to be able to click on a “pointer” icon or hit Esc). Second confusion - some of the properties come from RIght-click/edit shape properties, and some properties come from “Edit…” button. It might be more clear if the items in the “Edit” button were just shown in the left pane since there are only a few.
When setting up the extents - a tooltip on the Mode Icons would be great.