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2. The Mops GUI

2.1 Anatomy of the Main Window

The main window is split into four large areas. A listbox named "Hierarchy:" plus some buttons, a listbox named "Properties:", an area labeled "Arguments:" and a text widget (the so called "Console").

The Hierarchy Listbox

The hierarchy listbox, you guessed it already, displays the object hierarchy of the current scene. Using this listbox you may browse through the hierarchy of the scene with your mouse and you may select one or more objects.

Browsing and selecting should be very intuitively: Use a double-click to enter a level (or an object with child objects), and a single click to select objects, multiple objects may be selected using click and drag, or holding down the Shift or Control key while clicking. Keyboard operation is also possible if the listbox has the input focus.

A ".." is displayed as the first element of the current level if you are "inside" a level or another object. Doubleclicking on the ".." brings you up a level. The buttons below may be used to change the selection or to quickly jump through the hierarchy. They should be self explanatory.

You will notice, that there is a first object called "Scene" in the top level, even though the scene seems to be empty. See section The Scene Object for more information regarding this special object, and what it is good for. Note, that you cannot delete or copy this object.

The Properties Listbox

This listbox displays the properties of the currently selected object.

If there are multiple selected objects in the hierarchy listbox, the properties listbox will display no properties at all.

Unlike the hierarchy listbox, where you can select multiple entries, only one property may be selected. If a property is selected, it's associated GUI will be shown in the appropriate area.

If a property is selected and a different object is selected using the Hierarchy listbox the property GUI that has the same index as the previously selected GUI in the properties listbox will be shown. To avoid that or to clear the property GUI for fast browsing through the scene you can use the "None"-button.

The Property GUI

What properties exactly will be shown, and how the GUIs look alike depends on the selected object and the selected property. This is documented in section Mops Objects and Properties.

Here are some general remarks:

The various things that may be changed using a property GUI will normally not be applied until the "Apply"-button is pressed!

You can undo all changes to the arguments of a property that have been made after the last click on "Apply" with the "Reset" button. This is, however, not an undo mechanism!

Note, that property GUIs of custom objects may also offer interactive elements that do an instant "Apply". All GUIs of the core objects of The Mops and the Scene object do not change anything until the "Apply" button is used, however.

Also note, that the property-GUI may also offer ways to destroy information, operations that cannot be undone! The NURB properties e.g. let you switch from a curve/patch with weights to a curve/patch without weight information, switching weights off will destroy the current weights. There is no way to get them back, as switching to a curve/patch with weights again sets all weights to 1.0.

A property may be copied and pasted to another object, see the Edit-menu. But, you cannot paste a property of type NURBPatchAttribute to a NURBCurve. The object you are pasting to, should have a property of the correct type. In other words, you cannot enrich objects with all sorts of properties this way.

Pasting a property to multiple selected objects does work too. This is a great way to apply e.g. a surface shader to a big number of objects, without going the long way of setting a new shader and entering parameters for it for every object.

Since the granularity of the properties may be too low, read you do not want to copy and paste whole properties all the time, you may mark single parameters with a double click on the labels of the parameters. The marked parameters will then be preceded by an exclamation mark.

If you now copy this property all marked parameters will be omitted.

It is also possible to copy just the parameters you marked using "Copy Marked Prop".

A simple example:

Our task is to give a big number of objects the same color, but they already have different opacity settings. We can accomplish this by copying just the color attribute, but leave all other attributes as they are:

  1. Change the color of a first object using the "Attributes" property GUI.
  2. Mark the color parameter as to be copied using a double-click on the text "Color"; it should read "!Color" now.
  3. Copy just the color parameter to the property clipboard, using "Copy Marked Prop" in the "Edit" menu or the hot key <Ctrl+I>.
  4. Select all other objects.
  5. Paste the property using "Paste Property" or <Ctrl+V>.
  6. All done!

Care must be taken when pasting incomplete properties to objects which do not have complete properties already. Do not paste an incomplete shader property to an object which does not already have the same shader!

The Console

The fourth part of the main window is the console. The console is mainly for text output (informative, warning and error messages). For this, the console captures the stderr and stdout channels of the Tcl-Interpreter The Mops is running in.

You can also enter commands, new Tcl procedures and so on in the console.

The size of the console is managed by a so called paned window management. Move your mouse to the upper border of the console until the mouse pointer changes. Now you may drag the border to adjust the space (relative to the upper part of the main window) that is consumed by the console.

The console has a (initially hidden) menu that you may open with the right mouse button.

Another important thing that should not be forgotten is that the keyboard shortcuts for the various main menu entries do not work if the console has the input focus! Instead, other keyboard shortcuts are in effect!

Simply press <Shift+TAB> to move the focus away if you intend to use main menu shortcuts.

Note, that the <TAB> key does not move the focus away from the console. <TAB> instead completes names of commands, files, variables and widgets. You may try this out by typing tip in the console, then press <TAB>. The console automagically completes tip to tipoftheDay (the procedure that prints out the tip of the day, try it).

Another simple demonstration of the consoles capabilities:

This example uses three procedures:

See section The Tcl Scripting Interface for a listing of all the available commands.

Note, that the example uses a side effect (the variable i that holds the index of the currently processed object) to calculate the amount of the movement and rotation.

For more information regarding the console, please refer to the appropriate documentation by the original author Jeffrey Hobbs (see the console-menu).

The Menu

Another important part of the main window has not been discussed so far, this is the main menu bar. Note, that many menu entries have keyboard shortcuts that are displayed in each entry. You can adapt the shortcuts using the file "mopsrc".

The File menu deals with standard file operations:

The Edit menu contains standard clipboard operations:

The Create menu entries let you create objects:

The Tools menu:

The Custom menu is initially empty. Custom objects and PlugIns, may create entries here.

2.2 Anatomy of a View

The view window is split into a menu bar and a OpenGL-widget, where interaction and drawing takes place. The title of the view window gives information about name, current type and action of the view.

The View Menu

Here are all meny entries of the View menu:

The Configure menu may be used to change preferences of the view. All possible preferences are outlined in section Views.

View Window Shortcuts and Actions

Important keyboard commands of a View:

Interactive actions:

You may also move the view by dragging with the rightmost mouse button and zoom the view with the middle mouse button.

Additionally, if you hold down the Shift button while dragging with the rightmost mouse button you can move the camera in the direction it is looking. Note, that this affects both from and to. Furthermore, this movement will have no visible effect in parallel views.

If you have a wheel mouse and it is configured to send Mouse4 and Mouse5 button events, The Mops will zoom the view when you turn the wheel (Linux only).

Using the menu entry Zoom to Object or the shortcut <Ctrl+o> you can change the views from to and zoom settings so that the selected objects will be displayed centered in the view window. This is handy, if you are e.g. searching for objects or simply lost in space.

2.3 The Tool Box Window

The tool window displays some buttons that start interactive modeling actions or other modeling tools or create objects.

Note, that in contrast to the keyboard shortcuts of the view windows the buttons switch to the modeling actions for all available views. For more information about the actions see section Interactive Actions.

The tool window may be configured by the user using the preference setting toolBoxList in the mopsrc file. You may select from the groups and change the order in which they appear in the tool window.


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