Hi Danny,

> That's one thing with NX, once an object is a solid or joined
> surfaces you can't hide individual faces, NX considers the
> object as one entity. There is away around this so I can answer
> your question.

I guess that's why being able to name edges and so forth is feeling odd to you.

But the advantage is that since MoI can apply all regular object attributes to edges and faces, it does not need to have any kind of special "way around" it - all the normal tools such as Hide, Lock, selecting or hiding things with the scene browser, etc... all just work on edges or faces.

That helps provide a lot of flexibility while at the same time keeping the UI easy to use, since you don't have to use special "face tools" to colorize faces, you just use the regular tools for any of these.

For example in MoI if you want to be able to hide some partial chunk of a complex solid, you can do that by selecting the faces and assign a name - now that name will be available in the scene browser and you can click on the eye to turn that chunk on or off with one click. That would leave the edges still visible which may be kind of handy but if you wanted the edges in that area to hide as well you could assign them to the same name and then both the faces and the wires in that area would be controlled by that scene browser entry.

That's possible in MoI with the same UI controlling it all because of this ability to assign regular object properties to faces and edges...


I'm getting kind of a headache trying to follow what you are describing for NX, sorry... ;)


- Michael

Hi Danny, also I've got the options working now for being able to change how edges are displayed.

There will be a new setting for this under Options / View :



There are 2 choices under the drop-downs there: "By style", and "Fixed color".

The default is "By style" which means that edges and surfaces will display in their style color.

If you set it to the "Fixed color" option, then a swatch will appear which you can adjust:



When the "Fixed color" option is set, all edges or surfaces will use this specified color rather than being drawn in their style color.

So that will enable you to get edges displayed in black always if you want.

- Michael

Yep, they're the options we're looking for :) good stuff there Michael.

How will "Fixed color" work , can we still change colours of edges or surfaces if we want to, if we choose this option ?
Are the "Fixed color" edges of a Red cube still style red ?

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~Danny~

Exactly what I had in mind. Thank you very much, Michael.

Danny, I'm pretty sure these are simply display options, so the surfaces and edges are still being assigned styles as they normally would, but we can now override the color component of those styles when displaying the surfaces / edges.

shadow shadow shadow sun path diagram :)

Hi Danny,

> How will "Fixed color" work , can we still change colours of
> edges or surfaces if we want to, if we choose this option ?

It's like vodkamartini mentioned above - you can still assign things to have different styles the same as before, it just alters the display only so that the display will show your fixed color choice rather than showing the style color as it normally does.

Exports are not affected, so for example if you export to OBJ format styles will be used for the materials saved in the OBJ file same as currently.


> Are the "Fixed color" edges of a Red cube still style red ?

Yes, everything still maintains the same property values as before, it just purely overrides the display.

- Michael