Welcome to introduction lesson of the leadwerks editor. This lesson covers the main layout of the editor and its major feautres. We have opened the introduction map from the tutorial project.

The top of the editor consist out of several menu's and a toolbar




On the left side of the editor we find the quick construction toolbar. This toolbar contains big buttons that allows the user to create CSG brushes, create lights and select face or objects selection.

On the left side of the editor we find the project sidepanel. In here we find 4 tabs:

• Objects
  
• Assets
  
• Scene
  
• Terrain

The objects tab lets you create a kinds of objects that are baked in to the Leadwerks editor. The following items can be made:

• CSG objects
  
• Particle emitter
  
• Lights
  
• Pivots
  
• Camera

The assets tab in our project shows all the assets that are located in your project folder. Assets can be all kinds of files:

• Models
  
• Textures
  
• Materials
  
• Sounds
  
• Prefabs
  
• Scripts
  
• Shaders

When clicking on textures or models, you can view them in a sepparate editor.



The scene tab lists all objects in your current scene. When you select items in your scene list, they will get highlighted in the editor.




When an object is selected, the properpties panel will be shown. The following properties are present for all imported assets:

• General: Transform and name.
  
• Appearnace: Material and color settings
  
• Physics: physics related settings
  
• Script: An object can have a script attached to it.

Leadwerks features a terrain. More detail about the terrain editor will follow in another tutorial. When there is no terrain created, the following menu will be shown.




Terrain tab. for contructing and editing terrain.

CSG stands for Constructive solid geometry. CSG are simple geometric shapes that can be created inside the editor. CSG objects can make up a large part of the scene and often function as the mass or rough layout of your scene.



To create a CSG box in your scene you can click on the blue box icon in the left sidepanel.



Click and drag in the editor to create a box. Press Enter to confirm your creation. After creating it, you can still tweak your CSG object by positioning, scaling and rotating.


CSG brushes have automatic UV mapping. So even when scaling your object, the UV mapping whill remain intact. You can change the UV settings by pressing face mode.




Go to objects tab to adjust selected objects UV properties.

Models are high detail objects that you place in your scene. Often next to CSG objects to give more detail about environments. Leadwerks automatically imports FBX models in to your assets folder once you drag FBX models in to the editor or when you place them in the project folder. Models are then converted to the '.MDL' format.

The Leadwerks editor features realtime lighting and 3 types of lights:

• Spot lights
  
• Point lights
  
• Directional lights

You can click on the light creation icons in the left side bar of the editor. Place them in the scene by clicking on in the scene and by pressing Enter.



If you create a spotlight in your scene you can drag it around and rotate it. Scaling won't work on lights.



Every light has their own extra tab in the properties panel. Here you can set light specific settings For the spotlight for instance, we set the cone angle. This influences how sharp the edge of the light/shadow is.