Table of Contents
Basics of PAC3 Editor
To get familiar with the User Interface, it's good to go over each section, each subsection, and so on to understand the structure and format of each part of the menu.
The PAC editor
This is where most PAC work is done. The PAC editor is where parts are inserted, modified and arranged.
An important thing to understand is that PAC is fundamentally hierarchical, visualised as a tree structure. The image above is an example of this involving a parent model containing child models one of which contains child models of its own. By convention, the topmost groups can be called “root groups”. Root groups are assigned to entities (player, NPCs, props, etc.) so the most common root group is one on the player. New root groups can be created by dragging a group to the top of the editor as shown in the image below.
File navigation dropdown
Saving and loading outfits and parts requires to find where to save to or load from. To find a PAC outfit or part, the file navigation dropdown is where you browse to find the desired item. Hovering over each outfit or group will open the dropdown to one level deeper, where you can find their contents.
You can load PAC outfits from URLs, the example PAC outfits, and locally-stored PAC outfits, and locally-stored temporary backup outfits (from the current PAC configuration, backups are stored occasionally so that one can recover lost work).
When saving outfits, you can create new folders and files, overwrite <color #ed1c24>(WARNING. IT WON'T BE RECOVERABLE IF OVERWRITTEN)</color> or delete an existing outfit, or define the autoload (automatically loaded on spawn) outfit.
One can also save specific parts by right clicking the part and saving from there.
Adding parts
To add parts, one can right click a part to add a child part to it from the parts dropdown containing the parts' categories. One can also click the (+) icon to the right of the hovered-over part to open the part search menu to find a specific part.
Inserting parts
When adding parts to a parent part, the added parts are inserted as the children of that parent part.
On the other hand, loading parts from a file replaces the selected part with the loaded topmost part's settings. This is important to keep in mind when importing parts from different PAC outfits because loading wrong parts at the wrong levels can cause issues of a few kinds. To mitigate this, we could come up with some good practice that can reduce the unwanted actions resulting from misuse. For example, creating a new root group so that one can load a root group from another outfit makes it easier to view the parts in that group so that one can choose which parts to drag into the current outfit's groups.
The Toolbar
The toolbar is the top part of the PAC editor UI menu. It contains dropdowns containing options, tools and external links. Click the toolbar and hover the mouse over the desired dropdowns to access these.
pac
This section contains the outfit loading management and links for help.
view
This section contains settings related to the PAC view camera. Hide editor temporarily hides the PAC editor menu (it is still active) until reopened with ctrl+e. The PAC editor camera always moves relative to the selected part's entity's movement unless camera follow is disabled.
options
This section contains many options, such as advanced mode (which is not actually anything particularly difficult, just unrestricted access to all parts), rendering settings such as no outfit reflections and render projected textures.
player
This section contains options about the player. Here one can go into T-Pose to reduce unwanted movement when finely moving parts, and reset the eye angles to look straight. One can also disable size and model modifications of the player.
tools
This menu contains many useful functions to speed up work.
The spawnmenu side of PAC
Like most addons with settings, you can access some of the settings of PAC in this part of the gmod spawn menu. PAC's settings are located in the Utilities tab of the spawn menu.
The PAC3 menu
This part of the menu contains the buttons to access the PAC editor, to wear (send to server in order to show it to the other players on the server) the current PAC configuration loaded, to clear the current PAC configuration. There can also be found the list of all PAC outfits located in …/data/pac3/sessions. Selecting any of them will set it as the current PAC configuration. If you do not find your outfit here, chances are it's stored outside the sessions folder, and you'll need to access it in the editor's file browsing dropdown.
Below the outfit loading sections will be some of the server-specific functions such as the blacklist, which will list players in the server, selectable to prevent certain players from seeing your PAC outfits. Having the blacklist act as a whitelist inverts this behaviour: allow only certain people to see your PAC outfits.
The Settings menu
Here are some of the settings of PAC. Draw distance restricts how close to the player that parts need to be to be drawn. Setting it to 0 removes this restriction, and -1 further makes your own outfit visible even in first person. Max render time stops drawing outfits that take too much time to render. Other settings are self-explanatory or unclear.