Getting Started

Today’s commercial needs are based on demands of 3D visualisation, e.g. in the context of augmented reality, so that user can experience the product before actually getting it in hand. Market’s need of interactive graphical production requires a high quality graphical tool that can create configurable graphical data based on the data provided by the configuration services. Alongside that such tool needs to be supported by the most used data platform of the era “The Cloud”. So a graphical tool based on cloud, which allows configuring graphical data is what the visual world probably needs.

We, the team of intelligentgraphics are working on this technology and present the IG.Creator, which allows the user to import the commercial data from an external configuration service and create 3D models based on that data. It also allows exporting the commercial and graphical data in different forms.

In this getting started tutorial we will introduce you to the IG.Samples. This will show you how some of these samples have been created and how different graphical data can be modeled using IG.Creator. Lets go to the products page and see what samples we have in the list.

First of all please look at the top of the page; right above the list of products you will see a blue bar showing what you have selected. Now lets start our tour. Please follow the steps below:

1. Select the product named ”BASIC_01”, you should see the this text in the status bar “Product: IG.Test.BASIC_01”.

2. Now if you look at the left panel of your window you should be able to expand Graphical under Products. Select Configurator, this will open a configuration and preview window. It should resemble the snapshot shown in figure below:

3. Now you will have to press the Support DB button at the bottom. This will activate the DB connection.

4. Now press the Update button, you should be able to see a yellow box in the right panel. This is based on the data available in the Support DB.

5. Lets play with this box, shall we? Lets try to open this, move your cursor to the right end of the box’s face and try to grab the end and then pull it out towards left. Just make sure that when you press the mouse button to grab, only one side of the box is selected not the whole box. Can you see the diamonds inside the box? No? That’s ok we will put them there in our configuration tutorial.

6. Use your curser to move around the box and have a look from all possible angles.

7. You must be curious about the data that’s being used to render these amazing 3D graphics. Let’s see what’s going behind the scene? Open the Assets menu in the left panel of your screen. Select Commercial and you should see three lists in right panel. First one on the left is the list of products; the middle one is list of properties for the product selected and the third one on the list of values for these properties.

8. This is the place where you can edit the properties and their values and those changes should reflect in the preview section.

So this is it for first part of the tutorial, now we will move to the next part where we will show you how IG.Creator handles different products and what features it offers for them.

In the first part of our tour we explained how you could configure properties of a product and preview it in the configurator window. In this part of the tour we will explain what advance features this tool offers to its users. Let’s explore more about the IG.Creator tool.

Lets repeat the above steps with another product. Try it with the product named “GEOMETRY_01”. You will experience a different behavior in configuration and preview section. This time you are not able to open boxes in this product. That’s because they are not boxes they are predefined cubes used in different sizes and positions to create this geometrical figure. Let’s see where you can find the geometrical arrangement for this figure. Find the Graphical menu under Products in the left menu. You should be able to see Geometry, select it and you will see the configuration data for the sizes and positions of the cubes.

You will find one more difference when you open up Materials screen from same Graphical menu. You can see how you can configure materials used for each side of the cubes. Go ahead edit the material and update it to see the effect on the Configurator screen.

We are not finished yet; you will experience another difference before we end our tour. Just try to open Evaluator under Graphical menu in left panel. You won’t find anything (Geometry_01 being selected). That’s because there is nothing to evaluate it’s a group of graphical shapes combined to create a geometric figure not a structure. Now, let’s try this with Basic_01 product. You should be able to see evaluation of its structure as it has one. This provides user a way to configure the structure of the product if it has one.

So, you see that IG.Creator gives you not just a rendering platform for graphical data but it also provides flexibility in the area of configuration and structural modeling of graphical data provided by the configuration services. All you need to do now, is start exploring it and a whole new world of configuration features will be disclosed to you.