All right, I've got some good progress on specular highlights also now.

Here's an example:



Here's one with the metallic option also enabled:



When you enable Specular highlights, 2 additional sliders appear in the UI that let you adjust the Brightness and "Focus size" of the highlights.

Here I've taken the above one and loosened the focus and dulled the brightness some, it gives more of a sheen to an object rather than a hard looking small spot:



- Michael

Hi Michael:

Could be the new lighting modes a problem with an older graphic cards?

Looking good there Michael, looks like your bordering the rendering side of things :)

BTW will you be looking at an option to have black edges also or is that out of the question ?

---------

Hi David,

> Could be the new lighting modes a problem with an older graphic cards?

Actually one of the cool things about this display stuff is that it is compatible with old cards as well, it should work all the way back to the original Radeon or GeForce1 cards.

All the screenshots that I posted are from a Radeon 9600 Pro card which is 6 years old.

I've tested it here on a Radeon 7500 and a Geforce2, which are very old - and actually you should upgrade to something newer if you have one of those because you can get something several generations newer and much faster for only about $30.

I think you would need to go back to about a 10 year old card for it to not work. I'm not sure yet about other than ATI or nVidia cards though, it is possible that some other systems like Intel integrated graphics may not have the support needed until somewhat more recently than that. If a card does not support what is needed, it will fall back to the old style basic lighting and all those new settings will not do anything in that case.

But it is likely that if you have a good enough graphics card to run MoI well now, that it should work fine for these new display options as well.

- Michael

Hi Danny,

> BTW will you be looking at an option to have black edges
> also or is that out of the question ?

I'm going to be looking into some options for a "display override" type mechanism, I'll probably be able to fit an option for overriding the color of edges into that.

I'm not quite sure exactly how it will work quite yet but probably you'll be able to edit a text file that has a list of different display modes for things like "Matte White", "Shiny Blue", "Metallic Red", etc... so that there can be a control that will let you flip between these different display modes. The way that will generally work is that each mode will list some properties that it overrides from the normal default view, so something like an edge color property could fit into that same scheme pretty easily I think.

- Michael

This all looks wonderful!

A matte white ("mud render"-like) mode, and something where you get black lines and, better still, black lines with depth-cueing, a la sketchup, would be really nice -- while it'll obviously never be a substitute for renders for anything that has to go in front of a client for real, getting fast, decent looking screenshots is still really handy.

/Ella

I'm definitely THIRSTY for this now!


One question, Michael - how does the lighting look if you're inside the model??

A lot of my models - buildings, docking bays, etc., require me to be inside the model for some bits - will it be like it is now, still lit inside or out?


-Will

Hi Will,

> A lot of my models - buildings, docking bays, etc., require
> me to be inside the model for some bits - will it be like it is
> now, still lit inside or out?

Yeah, it's the same as currently - basically it works like that so that objects that are open surfaces will look proper rather than having an arbitrary half of the surface all darkened.

- Michael

Looks fantastic, Michael. I'm digging the soft specular highlights.

I just want to add that I second Danny's desire to see black surface edges. I thought it would have been a checkbox option or something, but making it available in a config file seems accessible enough. Wouldn't it be more functional to have surface curves black and free standing curves colored according to their style (especially if you add the option to display/alter isoline densities in the future)? Blah, this is probably a discussion that was held earlier on in the forums. I'll look for it. Anyway, great job!

Hi vodkamartini,

re: Black edges - yes there was some previous discussion of that earlier here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2801.28

But note that you can get black edges right now if you want, just select all edges (quick way is to go to the scene browser / Types and click on the text part for the "Edges" entry), and assign them to a style that has color=black.

In MoI edges can be assigned their own styles and names, and be hidden and/or locked same as a regular object.

You're probably not used to that since Rhino does not have the ability to do that.

The same thing applies to faces as well, for example you can assign different styles to face sub-selections without needing to break it apart into individual surfaces.

- Michael

Hi Ella - I've added another option called "Fixed light positions" which when enabled makes the lights stay fixed in place instead of moving along with the camera as they normally do.

I think that combined with the "Hemispheric" lighting option should give you a mud-like matte style.

Depth-cueing will have to wait for some future version.

- Michael

Oh, wonderful! I was assuming that that'd be a v3 thing. Great! And yeah, I understand depth cueing being a completely different issue, being, you know, not a lighting thing at all. :-) Thanks.

/Ella

Hi Ella, here is what that Hemispheric style + "Fixed light positions" looks like:





- Michael

Hi Michael,

> But note that you can get black edges right now
> if you want, just select all edges (quick way is to
> go to the scene browser / Types and click on the
> text part for the "Edges" entry), and assign them
> to a style that has color=black.

That's a possibility, the only thing is, every time you create new bodies and preform Boolean operations you have to go through the procedure again.

The reason for black edges is not purely for aesthetics, it gives a positive contrast between surface colour and edges, you could say it's a modeling aid, visually it gives a clear indication of the surface structure and shows up any minor discrepancies better.

I tend to find having the edges the same colour as the body colour a bit distracting. There is this option in other modeling programs.

Will we have the option to have default colour for edges, because I see your procedure above in reverse being easier, edges are default colour and if a style is wanted for some edges then you can isolate that body select all edges using 'type' and assign a style.

Just one more thing, I still can't think why you would want to assign a name to an edge, does anyone do it ?

Cheers

>>>Just one more thing, I still can't think why you would want to assign a name to an edge, does anyone do it ?


Could it be "Attachment_edge_1" in an assembly?

> The reason for black edges is not purely for aesthetics, it
> gives a positive contrast between surface colour and edges,
> you could say it's a modeling aid, visually it gives a clear
> indication of the surface structure and shows up any minor
> discrepancies better.

I can't really think of a case where black edges would show discrepancies better.

Do you have an example where you can show that?


> Will we have the option to have default colour for edges,
> because I see your procedure above in reverse being easier,

Yeah the way I was describing above is just how you can set it up right now if you want.

I am going to be looking next into some methods for overriding different attributes of the display so you could have the option to for example have all edges drawn in black instead of in their style colors.


> Just one more thing, I still can't think why you would
> want to assign a name to an edge, does anyone do it ?

Probably not right now, but if you find yourself needing to select the same set of edges many times, then you can assign them a name to more easily select them with the browser the next time you need to do it.

By having edges behave simliar to a full object (being able to have a name, style, hide, lock, etc...), it gives it this ability to participate as a "named selection set" if you need that.

Similarly it has been useful to be able to select edges and hide them to get them out of the way visually the same as you would hide other objects to get them out of the way. That's all part of having edges behave in a similar way as a regular object.

- Michael

Thanks, Michael. As Danny mentioned, the method you suggested requires one to constantly reassign new edges. I realize it was only a temporary solution and that you will allow us to override the edge display, so all's well in the end. The ability to do those kinds of selections is very cool, btw. I think you've done a great job with the organizer.

I agree with Danny about the lack of contrast when surfaces and edges share the same color. It would definitely be nice to show those edge colors in a wireframe mode, but with surface shading on it tends to distract me (it feels like the edges are highlighted/selected). I'm curious what you think the advantage is. In terms of functionality, I think it's nicer to have surface edges black and free standing curves/objects colored because I can immediately see where the generating curves are, or curves that I may have extracted off of surface edges via copy/paste, etc. I don't mind if surfaces are assigned the same color as their generating curves, but I think the edges of that surface shouldn't be. Maybe this could be a toggle? I dunno.

Anyway, I like the reverse methodology Danny suggested. Edges display as black until you manually assign them a style. It just seems like a better default, in my humble opinion.

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

I wonder if this could tie in with some sort of Parent/Child scheme? Along the lines of booleans and the reaction of the styles. I know you had already discussed this and didnt have any particular idea/method, like thinking through asking for a setting to enable some kind of parent/child interation, Just shooting it out there.

Just noticed that the boolean face retains the style of the original object!!! By bad.