Hi vodkamartini,

> I'm curious what you think the advantage is.

Check out this previous post for an example of an advantage when it comes to selection:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2801.28

Notice that having the edges colored, when an object is selected there is still some visual indicator of its style.

The same thing applies if you want to have a kind of wireframe view where the surfaces are hidden and only the edges are showing - if the edges did not show in the style colors you would not get any idea of the style when viewing in that mode.

It also just generally opens the door for more kinds of styling in the future like possibly being able to have styles that had additional stuff that could affect edges like brush strokes or sketch-like drawing styles. If edges stayed black it would make them sort of "dead". If they participate in styling in a normal way then it opens the door for more kinds of effects to be easily applied to objects in the future.


> Anyway, I like the reverse methodology Danny suggested. Edges
> display as black until you manually assign them a style.

That would have some bad side effects with other parts of the style mechanism - currently when you select a solid, the style property that is reported back to you is the combination of all the styles assigned to its sub-objects, which for solids is all of its faces and edges.

If edges did not get assigned the same style when setting the style of a selected solid, then the style property for that solid would be reported as "Various styles", since it would have faces on one style and edges on another style - that's not bad to be able to set manually but it is not a good thing to do by default.

It would especially be weird to set the style of a solid to something like "Red" in the style dropdown from the object properties panel, but then have it say "Various styles" instead of "Red" as the current property value. That would be the side effect from doing what you mention here.


Having edges participate in styles the same as faces makes things behave in a more uniform and predictable manner, and just sets things up better to have additional kinds of effects in the future. That's mostly why it is set up in the current way.


But today I should be working on some methods to override the default, so that you could have either faces or edges displayed in a fixed color of your choice rather than showing in their style color.

- Michael