Founder Engine: the tools behind the images
Founder Engine began as a way to work directly with rendering and has grown into the editor I use for these scenes and character studies. Built on NVIDIA RTXPT and DirectX 12, it connects worldbuilding, materials, character look development, animation and diagnostics through a native Qt interface. The gallery records the tools in my current dark and red theme. A feature needs more than a working viewport. An imported asset must retain its identity; a material edit must reach the instances that use it; a heavy operation must not freeze the first interactive frame. I spend a substantial part of development on those less visible connections: background import, recoverable drafts, undo, Apply/Publish steps and saved scene state. The three workspaces share that foundation. The main Editor handles scenes, terrain and world systems. Character Studio focuses on imported character materials, hair and lighting. Motion Studio prepares animation data and tests motion-matching playback. The captures below explain the controls and their role in that workflow, including experimental features that are still evolving.
Terrain layers, seeded scatter and splines connect the landscape to roads, rivers and vegetation. Water authoring separates bank fitting, terrain carving, flow, waves, foam and absorption. Keeping those controls distinct lets me change a river's shape without losing track of its material or simulation settings.
Character Studio brings material parts, card-to-strand conversion, scalp painting, grooming and guide-based physics into a focused workspace. Motion Studio takes characterized skeletons and source clips through retargeting and preprocessing to controller testing. Both workflows keep intermediate data visible so a failure can be traced back to its source.
Browse the editor by task. Each capture includes the controls and a description of what they are used for.
Qt provides the docking interface, Flecs holds scene data, DirectX 12 drives rendering and Jolt handles physics. FBX import uses ufbx in a separate transactional worker, keeping heavy import work away from the editor process. The tools expose those runtime systems through editable components, assets and saved scenes.
The profiler separates CPU time, GPU time, RAM and VRAM. I use those views alongside loading and frame-pacing records to locate expensive preparation, resource growth and stalls. The values in a screenshot describe that session and configuration; the useful part is how the tool helps identify what to investigate next.
These are captures of working editor states. Individual panels can include experimental controls; their presence does not mean every combination is finished. Imported assets retain their original authorship.
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