Selection hall

Work on the 3D website builder is proceeding nicely. We had some struggles with the new Unity UI system that is still in beta and has some weird quirks. But we managed to work around almost all of them.

In this phase we focus primarily on managing your resources like 3D models and textures, that you will use in your 3D site. I already showed the model workshop, but now you can also select textures, change colors and change the shader(s) it uses.


Selecting a texture is not like browsing through a list of thumbnails of course. We are Orbcreation, we build 3D websites, so you select your texture in a 3D environment. For now this is a simple hall that is filled with all your textures. In this hall you can fly around, inspect a texture, search and select. You can switch between the textures provided by Orbcreation and your own.


A smooth working selection hall calls for some advanced camera control. There are 3 camera modes:
- free mode: you fly around like in a 1st person shooter game
- inspect object mode: you click-hold an object the camera will let you orbit around the object and zoom in/out
- inspect multiple object mode: you orbit around the entire region


But what if a user has uploaded hundreds of textures? Well, we came up with a very fast way to download a miniature version of all those textures in a single request. So you will have the entire hall filled with hundreds of textures to choose from in the blink of an eye. The textures are ordered by color, but if you can't find what you are looking for, you can always use the search function.