Ever heard of HeroEngine? I didn't … until today. If you are like me very interested in workflows and tools for interactive real-time 3d content production - you probably want to take a closer look at it.
The HeroEngine is a commercial MMO game engine with plenty of tools and artist-friendly workflows. Something very interesting is the multi-user world editing in real-time. Multiple designers can work on the same 3d scenario at the same time. You can watch a pretty long demo video of that on their site.
Although they say it's something "never been seen before", the idea itself is not new. There is a project called VERSE which is a protocol and library for collaborative work in 2D or 3D. There are implementations for 3ds max, blender and gimp. (It also allows to connect different applications like shown here between blender and the funky 'Loq Airou'). Well, back to topic ….
The HeroEngine's World-Building tool comes with a lot of 3d editing gizmos. Many similar to 3d max. In addition to that there are additional 'manipulators' that easily allow to insert new knots in paths and splines or to insert new vertices for altering shapes of regions. For some objects they have additonal handles for volume or orientation - like in splines based extrusions.
Also interesting is the visual slope-filter control for editing/painting terrain:
Comment by terminalsymbol — Sunday, 6th April, 2008 @ 10:04