After discussion of special field types you get help on
See also part 1 of the VRweb VRML Editor help.
With this dialog you can insert an object into your scene. First, select the group into which you want to insert an object in the scene, or deselect anything to insert new objects at the root level. Insertion will not work if you have selected a geometric object.
In the upper listbox select the object primitives item, then select one of Cone, Cube, Cylinder, or Sphere in the lower listbox. Other items appear when you have installed object libraries (not yet part of the distribution). Or select the File button, to insert the contents of a file into your scene (physical copy as opposed to URL reference). Select Insert to copy the data into the scene.
The bottom field editor lets you enter an URL or a relative filename (see above) for a WWWInline node. Select Reference to create the reference. Known bug: changes made inside WWWInline nodes can not be saved.
Select an object or group and you may edit the anchor URL and/or description to make a WWWAnchor. As for WWWInline nodes (see above) the URL may be given absolute or relative. The description of anchors is shown in the status line of browsers before following them. Select Apply when done, Reset to restore the previous values, or Delete to remove the link going out from the object.
While in edit mode, VRweb selects objects and not anchors with a single left mouse click, thus you don't see the anchor description in the status line.
It is not yet possible to use the items of the Anchors menu for this purpose.
Using this dialog you can apply a texture image (Texture2 node) to the selected object or group. Either enter the URL (absolute or relative, see above) or browse for a File to be used as texture (the preview is only shown for local files). The listbox would display textures of a library (not yet part of the distribution).
In the lower part of the dialog you may transform the texture by translation, rotation, and scaling. Transformations affect texture coordinates and not the image itself, so you e.g. have to scale by 0.5 to get the image twice as big. (The 2D rotation is specified by an angle only.)
Select Apply when done or Reset to restore the previous values. Reload will reload an image file that may have changed. Clear the URL field and select Apply to remove an applied texture.
Creating texture coordinates for non-primitives (IndexedFacesets) is not trivial, and not included in VRweb. Textures will only show up on primitives and objects that have texture coordinates assigned. Also, make sure you have activated texturing in the viewer.
With the material editor you can edit the appearance of an object (see also lighting options). The material is made up of the following colors:
With the Structure Viewer you can examine the grouping hierarchy of the scene. Groups are useful to apply transformations or properties to a group of objects at once. The structure view is simplified by showing only geometric objects and grouping nodes and not any attribute nodes (e.g. Coordinates, Materials, Viewpoints etc.) which you also find as nodes in the VRML file.
The buttons on the right side give quick access to the View Selection feature and the Selection functions as described under Object Selection.
The lower button group provides access to the copy and paste operations. As mentioned there, copy and paste operations create multiple object instances (DEF/USE). You can edit these names in the Name field at the bottom (hit return after entering a new name). You also see multiple instances of the selected object with a special highlight in the structure viewer.
This dialog complements the object manipulation interface. Edit the translation, rotation and scaling values - in object or world coordinates.
Select Apply when done or Reset to restore the previous values.
As you know, VRML allows the definition of multiple viewpoints. When viewpoints were already defined you can select them in the lower listbox to jump to them. Viewpoint names can be entered in the Name field (press return after changing it).
To define new viewpoints, select the Add button. If you wish to modify an existing viewpoint, select it in the list. Then navigate to the desired view. If you wish to take the view over to the viewpoint, select Set; otherwise just select the viewpoint again to return to the previous values.
The camera parameters may also be edited in the fields in the upper part of the dialog; the Zoom value (camera height angle in radians) can only be set this way.
Finally, the Delete button deletes the selected viewpoint from the list.
The grid shows how your scene is oriented in virtual 3D space. You should remember that x points to the right, y is up, and z out of the screen, forming a right-handed coordinate system. Grids are displayed orthogonally to the selected axis (e.g. select y to get a grid in the horizontal xz-plane). Using the sliders, you can place them at arbitrary positions along their axis.
The extent of the whole grid and the distance between the singe grid lines can be set with the other two sliders. All values may be given in absolute values (as they are in the VRML file) or relative to the current size of the scene. Select Apply to apply the values to the grid or Reset to restore the default values.
The VRweb editor functions have been programmed by Alexander Nußbaumer. This documentation was written by Michael Pichler.
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