particle editor ? - Githubissues

zz85 / sparks.js

a lightweight 3d particle engine in javascript, compatible with THREE.js and TWEEN.js

435 stars 47 forks source link

particle editor ? #9

Closed jeromeetienne closed 12 years ago

jeromeetienne commented 12 years ago

is there an editor to edit particles in a sparks.js compatible manner ?
it helps quite a bit non tech people to produce nice looking particle

jeromeetienne commented 12 years ago

ok ok it is a bit theorical issue :) i will write such editor as i need for my own purpose. aka design effects for games. the 2 stacks init/actions makes the editor quite easy to understand i think. we will see. i will update this issue with progress

zz85 commented 12 years ago

Btw, do you mean a particle editor in the form of a code editor or a UI editor?

I currently have no plans to work on a UI editor yet, until the library has become more matured. But either ways, both would be good to have. :)

jeromeetienne commented 12 years ago

I was thinking about a ui editor. I think i can write something usefull with basic dom widget.

In my experience, Particles need an editor to be used in the field. The ui editor makes it much faster to design a given effect, even for me, a coder. Well we will see :)

zz85 commented 12 years ago

I had some simple UI to help me tweak parameters for spark.js http://www.jabtunes.com/labs/arabesque/developer.html but a simple graphical UI to configuring sparks.js would be great.

jeromeetienne commented 12 years ago

i did some progress on the editor side

http://jeromeetienne.github.com/sparks.js/editor/ a half backed version with widget

http://jeromeetienne.github.com/sparks.js/editor2/ with a inline code editor

comparison and why i prefer the inline code editor version:

pro: you got full javascript flexibility... for examples the hue+closure in the heart example
pro: the editor is much easier to code/maintained :)
con: require programming knowledge
con: less visual (not cool to pick color for example)

What do you think ?

zz85 commented 12 years ago

not bad :)

i think that a gui editor would be useful to a beginners or to an experienced user to some fast prototyping. however, it may be quite an amount work to be done to integrate widgets to the library unless its done in an extensible maner.

some examples of such work which have been done before and can be seen at http://flexmonkey.blogspot.com/2010/03/flex-flint-particles-editor-with-node.html and http://idflood.github.com/ThreeNodes.js/

A code editor has its advantages, its useful for fast previews, and useful for showing snippets for examples and learning.

A code editor could also integrate color pickers or other utilities. For example, see http://dabblet.com/

jeromeetienne commented 12 years ago

coded and published at https://github.com/jeromeetienne/sparkseditor

closing :)

zz85 commented 12 years ago

nice work, and threenode.js also have some support for spark.js now.