3Doodle - WIP

Description:​

Today, I have the pleasure of announcing the alpha release of 3Doodle, a game carefully designed to let you do one simple thing: model things in three dimensions. In the interest of keeping the game playable for people other than professional 3D artists, the actual 3D modelling part has been greatly simplified. Instead of working with vertices, edges, and faces, your medium is small, colorable cubes. That's why it's called doodling--you don't have to be a professional 3D artist to create stuff any more!

Play 3Doodle discreetly at meetings whenever that one guy is presenting (unless you are that one guy). Pull it up when somebody puts you on hold, at lunchbreak, whenever. But be careful! It's easy to pick up, but not so easy to put down again.

Short demo:

Unfortunately, the video quality and framerate in the demo are very low due to the software I used. The game runs smoothly.

Controls:​

Q and E (or ' and /) control vertical rotation.
A and D (or the horizontal arrow keys) control horizontal rotation.
W and S (or the vertical arrow keys) control zooming level (scroll wheel control will be added shortly)
CTRL+Z undoes actions, CTRL+Y redoes them.
TAB hides the GUI.

Webplayer:​

You can find a limited web player version (minus saving and loading) here. I'd really appreciate it if you let me know what you think of the game so far!

Please note, 3Doodle is currently in an alpha stage, so let me know if you find any bugs. Thanks!

 

Pretty cool. What other things do you plan on adding?

 

Thanks! I'm planning on releasing a more complicated version if this one sees a decent reception, but the webplayer really demonstrates all I had planned. There are a few more things that will be in the final release, however. The biggest things are a nicer UI (with icons instead of text for buttons), saving and loading functionality (this is actually already implemented but doesn't work in the webplayer) and a comprehensive help screen.

 

Sounds pretty cool. Wil you ever add spheres/cylinders? That'd be cool. Also, maybe a feature where you could move the starting cube/object around. Looks cool, I like where this is going. This would also be great for a platformer. The only thing that might be a problem is the lines/cracks in between cubes. There should probably be a way to get rid of those. Looks great and has some good potential!

 

As far as those additional features: the idea of the game was to keep it as simple as possible. I'd originally had all sorts of cool stuff in there, but spent a lot of time getting rid of all the excess features to get a lean, mean, 3D doodling machine. I will likely include a first-person view of the model in the pro version at some point, but spheres and cylinders will likely never be introduced.

Not sure what lines or cracks you're talking about, but I'm glad you liked it!

 

I understand keeping it simple. By lines, I mean the lines that are seperating the blocks from each other, will there be any way to connect them together without the "seperation" lines? Really cool, I'm gonna buy the pro version.

 

Thanks for the support!

As far as the lines go, that's actually a small issue with the texture, which I'm fixing now. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

Perhaps there could be an option to continuously add cubes by dragging rather than just individual placements. This could give it even more of a doodle feel. Also maybe they could interlink, by that I mean the spawned cubes corner would snap to the centre of the previous cube. Just some ideas!

 

once the model is complete, how will the colliders be generated? and how will the model be grouped as a single object to drag around in unity?

 

@BBG: Those are actually some really neat ideas. I'll have to look into what I can do there!

@DPortugal, it's not a tool for modelling objects inside of Unity. It's going to be released as a separate app.

 

As a thought, I prefere to be able to use the mouse and left click to rotate the camera. Shouldn't be too hard

 

When I keep my mouse in one position and add cubes the camera is too slow to follow and quit it's work. Is it right I just can place cubes at the moment?

 

@Jamster: The only issue with that is that the tools are already mapped to left click. Do you mean right click?

@Alex: Sorry, I don't quite understand. What do you mean "the camera is too slow to follow and quit it's work"?

 

When I start placing cubes from startposition diagonal to me I mean. Other words: The placing is faster than the camera and loose target then. In my project I had the same problem with zooming, because the damping was slower than the cameramovement. So I had to enbed some rules to stop that.

 

Ah, I think I see what you're saying. If the cubes go out of view, you should zoom out ('S' or the down arrow key). This will let you see more cubes on the screen. The camera just looks towards the center of the cubes. It doesn't adjust zoom for you.

 

Right, but you could fix it. Don't forget - you always code for silly dumb people like me at first.

25% of my project I'm checking for "what a silly user yould do". Everything must work always at last. Fixing my zoom took me 2 days maybe, but now it's not destroyable I think.

 

You have a great point. Thanks for the feedback! I might make that design change. I'm not sure yet.

 

this is great, can't wait to buy full .

 

No need for a design change. Just fix the camera distance if someone do what I do. You could check y-axis and if the player do what I do the camera zoom out in bigger steps. Just a shot in the dark.

 

@Alex, that's true. Thanks again for the input!

I've finally gotten around to downloading some screen capture software and making a short video demo of 3Doodler's capabilities. Check it out:

 

Like I did some month ago I remember right now...

By the way, I don't know but: Maybe just switch the camera target to the last set object. Sure with rules when something comes too near to the player. Just an idea I had right at the moment.

The problem is maybe someone creates a huge tower of say 10000 cubes. After that he wanna create a platform based on the last stone. Next problem is to create a comfortable way to bring me back to the first cube the user placed.

I was thinking alot about this stuff because of my project.

lol... next idea: keep the whole object always in the same viewingdistance like it is in the beginning and work with the front back windows of blender. with zoom and mouse scroll ability reaching the borders. So the user controls whole work. I'm kinda bored this morning so here are some pics (the orange arrows could be clickable but I would prefer a mouse hit screenborder solution):

 

You have some interesting ideas. The second one, if I understand correctly, is too complicated for the target audience I had in mind, I think. However, I definitely agree with what you said about cubes going off-screen and stuff. I've been thinking about this and I believe one possible solution might be to introduce a pan option, so that while the camera stays rotating about a single point, you can change the position of that point relative to the model. It's definitely something I'll have to look into.

 

Feel free to pm me if you wanna talk.