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Monday, April 23, 2007

This is NOT going to be easy

Ok, as I said I am a long-time Delphi Programmer. I have always loved it's easy user interface. So I downloaded Google Sketchup because my life as a Poser 7 artist has found me wanting for architecture.

Sketchup is a great tool to quickly imagine detailed outdoor urban settings. It has a few drawbacks though.

  1. It has no photorealistic rendering engine
  2. The free version can't export to a usable format
  3. The paid version is $500 (it's worth about $50)
  4. You can design rooms with an interior, but it's not easy.

So between that and the room designer for The Sims Online, I figured that I would try my hand at writing a C# program that would allow me to simply create and edit buildings and/or rooms. I must admit that I find C# really a difficult language to even approach this problem.

Questions:

What kind of object do I put in a form to draw on? A TPanel? a TPicture? It's not obvious.

What is the best way to create an in-memory XML Object that will store my object data in a hierarchy while I edit?

How do I draw and select from a canvas? like this? I love the way you can select boxes, arcs, and circles on any surface in Sketchup. I love the way to can match the extrusion of one surface to any other. But in C#, I can't even find a way to create a rectangle selection tool.

Another project dead on arrival :P

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