Even though Genr8 is a very interesting tool for the casual designer, there should always be that part you that questions what it is exactly you are doing. When growing large, complex surfaces and structures does the general artist really know what is going on ? Or does this become another piece of 3d software to play around with ?

If the application is large you will soon run into problems seeing the big picture when trying to analyze the source code. If you are using an application for designing which you really don't understand, it maybe worth your time to investigate the inner workings of that application, using more sophisticated tools.

As a designer and an Architect first and foremost, this is my starting point. As such programming can seem like a daunting task when you have other technical aspects to worry about such as building technology/engineering, and visual design aspects. But here also lies maybe the bigger payoff. Worth noting here are applications that can be of great help when trying to systemize your creativity. First of all, you have the environment of visual studio. Going way past pen and paper, here you would test your systems, and associate them with computer platforms and other software. But extending the visual studio application, there are certain tools found in the so called "feature packs" that extend the application. These tools make it possible to visualize your code, make code out of your visual ideas, and make sure most of all that code and idea end up expressing the same. Since Visual Studio does not support reverse engineering of native c++ code well, a good option is to use a specific software like Visual paradigm suite. This suite of applications also blends with the Visual studio IDE, so you have many different tools here. A lot of times, you will have in your possession pieces of code or whole applications/plug-ins/extensions that you want to extend or change. These tools give you the best possibility of doing so. You can as such integrate Visual paradigm into Visual Studio, being able to fully visualize your code, round-trip engineer or start your project in a visual way from scratch.

Starting with the solution from the debug compile of the plug-in, you can directly generate a dependency graph from code, and obtain( After pretty hefty analysis) a mental image or rather mental images of the connections and dependencies of the application. Click here to view a generated one. Elaborating on that schematic is this expanded version, which shows also indirectly included files.

Moving on, another interesting visualization is the class inheritance. Also these diagrams give you a visual overview of the members of the classes. Here is a non - expanded version and here is an expanded version.

More to Follow.....