CManager Documentation

The VTP Content Manager (CManager) is a useful tool for organizing, categorizing, and preparing your 3d models for use with the VTP software environment.

Features

• Load and view your models interactively to see how they will look in the virtual world.
• Organize multiple models representing levels of detail of the same object into a single conception 'Item'.
• Classify your items with high-level attributes.

How to Use

1. Put your models anywhere you like on your Data path.  Here are some recommended locations:
   • Buildings: Data/BuildingModels
   • Plants: Data/PlantModels
   • Vehicles: Data/Vehicles
   • all other culture: Data/Culture
2. Run CManager
3. Create an Item for each object you have modelled.
4. Give each Item a name (e.g. "1975 Ford Bronco") and a type (e.g. "sports utility vehicle").  You can optionally add any other attributes that you want, here, by adding Tags.
5. To each Item, add a Model.  You can either use "Add Model" and browse to your file, or drag-and-drop files from the Windows Explorer.  If the Models were created with units other than meters, you can set the scale factor for each one.
6. If you have several levels of detail, add more Models to the Item and set the "Visible at distance" field for each Model.  This is the farthest distance at which the model is visible.  If you only have a single model, you can leave this distance at "0".  You should add your models in order from most detailed to least detailed.
7. When you have added all your Items, save the Content file (.vtco file extension)

If you need more control over your content than CManager gives you, you can also simply edit your Content file by hand, as it is a simple XML format.

Feedback

CManager is "in beta" and the documentation is still very small.
However, you may find most features to be self-explanatory.
Please email any questions you may have to myself  or the mailing list.