Blogs - Property Sheets and Panels

Location: Blogs Behnaz's XNA Magic Blog
Posted by: behnaz	1/24/2007 12:47 AM
I've been putting the final touches to the property sheets and panels in the IDE. Tabbed property sheets can be opened on any object and you can change properties on the fly. There's also a nice and handy panel for transform. Sliders are all over the place which make life a lot easier especially when changing the transform or shader properties. Check out the video in Media Gallery called PropertyEditor.

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Comments (7)

Re: Property Sheets and Panels

By claydough on 1/24/2007 10:24 AM

Looks nice behnaz!

Will contextual keyframe animation be accessible from property panels?

Also, looking @ gizmos I noticed primitive placement/transforms were going on without any viewport navigation. In general, in most IDE or level editors viewport navigation can be the most frustrating bottleneck to werkflow. Will navigation options be customizable? In addition to flythroughs any application that allows me to setup viewport navigation Maya style gits an A++

Re: Property Sheets and Panels	By behnaz on 1/24/2007 2:40 PM
Thanks! Glad you like it. Keyframe animation will be accessible through the panels. Although the feature is probably going to appear in Beta2. You can certainly set properties for navigation, like if you'd like to navigate faster through a viewport. Are there any specific properties that you had in mind?

Re: Property Sheets and Panels	By Chris on 1/24/2007 4:16 PM
claydough - we haven't really used Maya - we're XSI fans so like Behnaz said if you can go into a bit of detail how it works in Maya that would be great.

Re: Property Sheets and Panels	By claydough on 1/24/2007 7:15 PM
Hey Chris, XSI is a fine example of Viewport navigation customization comfort. The folks @ Softimage realized that viewport navigation comfortness between application was a big selling point. Check out this video from Softimage regarding Maya migration viewport navigation within XSI. http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/tour/video_tour.aspx?video_id=5

Re: Property Sheets and Panels

By claydough on 1/24/2007 7:46 PM

Some more thoughts after re watching the video myself...

I have my 5 button mouse thumb button mapped to "alt" for Maya alt button navigation. This is so important to me I always have at least 1 back up mouse unopened in it's box waiting on standby in case anything should go wrong. That may seem a bit extreme.. However if you think about it. It becomes a very personal issue. Like driving a car in the US.. and then finding yourself in the UK sitting on the right side of car in the left side of the road. Every nerve in your body is uncomoftable!

The big 4 in Maya:

1 zooming is alt-lmb-mmb ( I never navigate with dolly... only keyframe )
2 panning is alt-mmb
3 orbitting is alt-lmb ( and is constrained to the y and x axis only ( z roll apps drive me loony tunes ) )

I couldn't tell you the unit speed of these movements but when it's off in another app you can sure tell the difference.

4 I presume you have a selection based center of interest hotkey... in Maya it's traditionally the F key. however this is so important to navigation I map this to my pinky mouse button. ( pinky carpal tunnel is no phun btw :) )

In a perfect world these navigations would be customizable for

Max guys
lightwave chumps
Unreal editing modders
and Wonderful developers who use XSI but would like to customize there app for Maya centric types...

Re: Property Sheets and Panels	By claydough on 1/24/2007 7:51 PM
Damn typos! no comment editing? I sound like a neanderthal

Re: Property Sheets and Panels

By behnaz on 1/24/2007 9:58 PM

Thanks for the info claydough! It's quite interesting to know what users are accustomed to when using design tools.

We'll definitely have an options section for mouse and keyboard mapping in the release version (if not in Beta2).

Like you said, it would be nice to be able to check say Maya or XSI in the options panel and all navigation keys will be automatically mapped for you for the Scene Designer.