Entity Manipulation

In this little tutorial we want to have a closer look to the Entity Viewer which holds all information about objects, materials, lights, etc in our simulation.

For that purpose open MARS and create a box named box using the controls available in the toolbar. If we check the EntityViewer now, we can see one node in the list named box. This represents the entity we just created. In the details you can edit its physical and visual properties.

As you can see the visual representation of the box changes to wireframe whenever you select it in the list of nodes. This indicates the selected status. If desired this behavior can be toggle off in the settings.

Lets move and rotate it by editing the pose/world/position and pose/world/rotation properties of the box.

Under visual/material you can see the name of the material assigned to that object. In our example it should be defaultGrey. If we now select materials/defaultGrey in the EntityViewer we can edit the visual properties of our box. Keep in mind though that altering the defaultGrey material also applies to all other objects which use this as their material. Since defaultGrey is a mars standard material and uses no custom shader program, assigning diffuseTexture and normalTexture will work. In other shaders this fields and others might not be used, so keep an eye on that.