Editor Workflow

Once your objects are Poseidons (see Getting Started and Importing from Your Modeler), the day-to-day workflow is simple: move things around in the scene, intersect them with other Poseidons, and watch the magic happen. This page covers the tools that keep that workflow fast when your scenes get big.

The Cost of Magic

While the workflow might seem easy, there is a cost to doing high volume computations like this. When you’re in a scene with hundreds of potential intersecting objects, the math can become complicated and slow. Carving runs asynchronously (frame-divided, on a budget you can configure), so the editor stays responsive, but you’ll still often want to make several adjustments before letting Poseidon carve everything into place. The tools below exist for exactly that.

The Poseidon Tools Overlay

Poseidon adds a Poseidon Tools overlay to the Scene view: a proper Unity overlay toolbar, so you can dock it wherever you like or collapse it down to the trident icon. Like any Unity overlay, you can also show or hide it entirely from the Scene view’s Overlays menu.

The default buttons:

• Auto Carve (the trident): whether Poseidon is running at all. This is the descendant of the old “Pause” button: toggle it off, move and arrange as many objects as you like with zero recomputation, then toggle it back on and Poseidon recarves the changes in one pass. When working in extremely large scenes, we’re constantly flipping this while getting the perfect set of tweaks.
• Deferred Mode: wait until mouse-up to recompute (see below).
• Wireframe Ghost: outlines carved Poseidons in a wireframe gizmo and pulsates the removed areas, so you can see what got cut away.

And a few optional ones you can enable via Overlay Options in the preferences:

• Log Carve Timing: logs timing data after every carve. Useful when profiling why a scene rebuilds slowly.
• Object Bounds: draws the bounding boxes Poseidon uses to decide what might intersect. Mostly for debugging why something got rebuilt.
• Settings: a shortcut straight to the Poseidon preferences.

Deferred Mode

When using Poseidon, it is nice to see things carving in realtime – but it is not nice if that “realtime” aspect takes forever to actually compute. Deferred Mode uses the “Mouse Up” event to decide when to recompute Poseidons: while you’re dragging (moving/scaling/rotating), nothing recarves; the moment you let go, Poseidon recalculates. We strongly suggest leaving this on most of the time, unless you really want to see everything carving in realtime.

Poseidon Preferences

The Settings button on the overlay (or Edit → Preferences → Poseidon) opens the preferences window, where the global knobs live:

• Editor Frame Budget: how many milliseconds per frame carving may use. Raise it to finish carves faster at the cost of editor smoothness.
• Transform Moved Threshold: how far something has to move before Poseidon considers it changed. A project-wide setting; raise it if distant objects seem to rebuild for no reason.
• Assemble Objects after Every Carve: whether results appear one-by-one as they finish, or all at once at the end.
• Prefab Mode Previewing (Experimental): preview carves while working inside prefab mode. It recomputes each time you open the prefab and doesn’t save the carve into the prefab.
• Mark Entire Active Scene as Dirty: a button for when you want to force the whole scene to recompute.
• Look-and-feel options: the Inspector Theme and Inspector Features (see below), wireframe colors, overlay buttons, inspector help text, tabbed vs. list inspector.

Inspector Themes

Poseidon’s inspectors come in several skins. Pick one under Edit → Preferences → Poseidon → Inspector Theme, or right-click the Poseidon component header and choose Switch Theme to cycle through them:

• Deco (default): the 3.0 Art Deco look — navy ink, gold linework, and diamond accents.
• Greek: the warm-stone flavor — bronze gold, meander (Greek key) borders, and column ornaments.
• Chart: a nautical survey chart — deep navy with cyan linework, a plotting grid, crosshair markers, and a scale-bar footer.
• Classic: the pre-3.0 inspector, unchanged, for those who prefer the stock Unity look.

The theme applies to every Poseidon editor at once: the Poseidon component itself, the Runtime Watcher, and the Carving Group components. Separately, the Inspector Features preference toggles optional flourishes — Rounded Corners softens the themed cards and fields, and Rotation Knob draws the UV Rotation control as a rotary dial (click or drag to aim it; hold Ctrl to snap to 15° steps) instead of a slider.

Inspector Tips

The Poseidon Inspector has a question mark button which will toggle help text above most options on the inspector. The “T” button toggles between a tabbed mode and a list-mode for the categories in the inspector.

The inspector’s context menu (right-click the component header) has a few useful commands: Rebuild Poseidon forces a single rebuild, Force Rebuild All recomputes every Poseidon, and Remove and Revert Mesh undoes a Poseidon’s effects entirely and restores the original mesh, for when you’re done with it for good.

The inspector also offers a number of warning boxes when things aren’t correct. We strongly suggest resolving those using the “Fix Now” buttons. These include things like changing Box Colliders to Mesh Colliders, meshes that aren’t Read/Write Enabled, or UV overrides that were generated when the mesh had a different number of materials. Please pay attention to these in order for your Poseidons to work correctly.

Where to Go Next

The Advanced tab of the inspector is covered in Advanced Features, texture seams are covered in UVs & Materials, and if your carved meshes need lighter wireframes, see Mesh Cleanup.