Onions have layers and make you cry, which is exactly what HM3 has been all about the last few days. I’ve been working on getting the layering stuff all worked out, which has been more challenging than I anticipated. Unlike the Minis, in HM3 all items are in the same “bucket”. All of the “Headgear” items were in the Headgear bucket, so if you wanted to move a particular Headgear item on top of, say, a Mask, while leaving all the other Headgear items below it, well, too bad. You can’t do it.
But in HM3 all the items and the layers they are on stay in the same bucket, so you can put any item on any layer you like. Which is good. But by default, I want it all to layer as you’d expect, with hair on top of the head and belts on top of pants and footwear on top of the feet they’re supposed to go on, etc. My goal is, for anyone who wants to just use it with the basic defaults in place, it’ll function just like HM2.x, more or less. I thought that would be easy to pull off, but it wasn’t.
I finally got the layering stuff working today, though, and to show you the fruits of my labor, here’s the latest screen shot:
Notice that I also am about to get “grouping” working, so you can move, scale, and rotate nested items together. In other words, you can move the Hair with the Headgear and the FacialHair and the Mask and the Head all at once, or make them all the same size at once, etc. Pretty neat. It doesn’t actually work yet but it will. I swear it!
Anyway, let me know if you see anything hinky or if you think of something it’d be cool to have.
Oh yeah! I forgot I also got a primitive “Zoom” feature working so you can get up close on the head for more of a classic “portrait” sort of look. I need to make it more fully-featured, but the basic idea is there.
