opacity

 From:  Michael Gibson
3933.3 In reply to 3933.1 
Hi eric, you mean you've got some edges bleeding through in the display?

That's not really due to transparency or opacity - it's caused by a mechanism that pulls the edge and curve display forward towards the viewpoint when they are drawn so that things like edges of a surface don't get partially submerged inside the surface while they are drawn.

It somewhat errs on the side of pulling a bit more rather than pulling a bit less, because not enough pull tends to look pretty weird in even more circumstances, with edges being kind of "stippled" with some sections of them hidden when it should not be.

The side effect of that pulling is that if you have objects with kind of thin walls in them, the edges from the back side of the wall can get pulled enough so that they are visible when they should not be.

It's unfortunately a pretty difficult problem to solve - if you need to do a presentation you probably should create a rendered image, a renderer has a lot more leeway to be more accurate with some of this stuff, the realtime display is limited in comparison to a full rendered image because the realtime display has to operate under a kind of restrained environment that the video card offers.

I have some ideas on some possible improvements in this area in the future, but since it is a tricky area to work on I'm not exactly sure how they will work out yet.

- Michael