I managed to get a simple blocky thing up and running. Finally managed to load a texture for a material without running into errors. It took a lot of trial and error, and had to go back and forth with the example capx's until it finally worked. My current opinion is that there is a bit of work to do with making the plugin more accessible, and as others have said, it would greatly benefit from some documentation to clear things up. Obviously stuff like that takes time, and I'm happy to have something to play with until then. Still trying to figure out how to load a sprite, and the particulars of creating and applying materials to objects. It isn't exactly user friendly at the moment.
Does anyone know of any good resources for learning the basics of relevant 3D game concepts? I've googled around, and there are lots of bloated tutorials that either focus too much on a particular engine or language (which obviously doesn't help with Construct) or just assume too much understanding at the beginning. Things that should be simple seem quite a chore, like, you have to load a texture file into Construct first, and then also load in the event sheet, and then create a material and reference the loaded file, and then create a piece of geometry, and apply the material. It's like 4 or 5 steps that could (should?) be taken care of behind the scenes. It's not like you'll ever apply a material without first loading the texture, right? I mean, Construct is generally very good at hiding the unnecessary complexity from the user. It's what makes Construct so awesome. If you've imported an image file into the project, I think it should be taken as granted that you'll be wanting to load it before you use it.
Anyway, take this as a comment rather than a complaint. It's not like I'm unhappy with the purchase. It's just that this plugin has so much potential to completely transform Construct, and I hope it gets there.
Thank you for the kind words! I'm definitely trying to make the plugin more accessible but i didn't want to make the plugin limited so i tried to get all the important core functionality as un-user friendly as some of it is into the plugin first. As i've said, I'm working on a separate sub-plugin that already handles all the model loading, scaling, placement in the editor, etc for you without the hassle of loading stuff manually if you don't want to. Features like simple physics are probably also going to be a part of the plugin, but no promises there yet.
The thing with the object-material-texture pipeline Q3D is set up to use, is that unlike a sprite in construct, which is a completely defined object within construct with its own construct specific rules, 3D models can come from such a great number of places with a bunch of individual needs with regards to texturing etc. It's not as simple as saying this is your texture and thats the end of it. UV settings are important, blending settings are important, sharing textures is important, sharing materials is important, a bunch of things are really really really important to get a 3D object with textures looking proper. Sometimes people don't want a texture at all for certain aspects like environment mapping or specular mapping, maybe sometimes they don't want a diffuse map, sometimes they want the diffuse map to also be the bump map. These kinds of needs were important to address so i couldn't just force people into a paradigm that doesn't work in all cases.
I'm limited by the SDK in what i can do right now, i can't add my loading stuff to the construct loading system (which is something i wanted to do) because the SDK gives me no way of doing that easily. I can't (don't think i can) get a list of the files in the files folder, because the SDK has no documented way of doing this. There are lots of little things like this which i can't do anything about right now but i'm trying my best to make the best use of whats available.