Hi Mike,

> Michael, do you plan on making V3's UI customizable as well?

Well, it already is in the same sense as V2's was - the UI is still all made up of stuff that's in the \ui sub-folder.

The way it is all set up is a little different than v2 though - in v3 things like rounded corners and buttons come from various parameters (like gradients and border-radius values) that are declared in the moi.css file rather than having all those different things come just from images.

So for example the way a button is defined is all contained in the moi.css file in the PushButton section there, there aren't any bitmap images used for a button anymore. That should make it easier to do things like change colors to different themes since the color can be changed just by changing a numeric rgb value rather than having to make a new custom image for every UI element.

So it's a bit different strategy and setup than how V2/V1 was using though.

I still plan on making some changes in this area - I'll probably be making a system so that the colors in moi.css will get replaced by some kind of labels and there will be another separate file that defines the color for each label. Then it will be possible to change colors just by changing that color definition file and it should make it easier to have some different color themes to switch between which will switch between different color definition files. This part is still to come though.

So anyway there will still be some more changes coming in this area, so it's probably not a great idea to invest a whole lot of time in it just yet.

- Michael

Very good then.

But from what you're saying then, I'll be able to customize the color of the buttons, but I won't be able to use the nifty glossy custom bitmap button components I use now?
Okay. :-|

Might I make a suggestion, that the ability to change the (basic) color scheme across the board, such as the buttons color, UI background and basic type, could be changed via color picker in the options dialog as we can change the grid and 3D view backgrounds now.

Hi Mike,

> But from what you're saying then, I'll be able to customize
> the color of the buttons, but I won't be able to use the nifty
> glossy custom bitmap button components I use now?
> Okay. :-|

Well, I guess you still could do that, but you'd have to do a much bigger change to the way the buttons are set up, you'd need to make your own CSS for it that used background images instead of gradients and border-radius.

It would be possible but you'd have to be pretty familiar with HTML and CSS use to do that - it probably wouldn't be like changing one little line on the existing setup.


Or another way to do it would be to further tweak the gradients and border thickness values and stuff like that rather than using images.


Basically I wanted to get away from using images for the various UI elements like edges and corners and stuff like that because it's pretty annoying to have to generate a whole set of new images just to change colors of different things.



> Might I make a suggestion, that the ability to change the
> (basic) color scheme across the board, such as the buttons
> color, UI background and basic type, could be changed via
> color picker in the options dialog as we can change the grid
> and 3D view backgrounds now.

I don't think that's feasible because there are quite a bunch of different colors used in different areas, and they don't necessarily all derive as lighter or darker shades of a single base color.

So because there are various colors used in the UI and not just a single base color, it follows that trying to only set one base color won't really work.

It would require a different kind of overhaul to the UI system to allow for that, one where various colors were derived in different ways from a base one, that's a pretty complex thing to set up. My main goal is to just make it possible to easily edit a color definition file with all the colors labeled in it, and then to have a few different preset color definitions available to switch between.

- Michael

ah...

Thanks Michael.
Well, half the fun is figuring out how to tweak it! ;-)
But it sounds like you've put good thought into how to keep the UI stable and fast, as with sometimes V2 seems to forget to redraw things in the UI when the system is doing too much at once.

magic

excellent, your lighting works well. very grateful.

regards

mario

Does the Viacad 2D/ 3D (100$) can import + export STL format?
(there is no complete lists' formats on the Internet page :(
http://www.punchcad.com/p-9-viacad-2d3d-v8.aspx

Hi Pilou,

> Does the Viacad 2D/ 3D (100$) can import + export STL format?

Yes.

- Michael

Thx for the info!

PS So Viacad can import a polygonal file inside its system without problem?
I presume yes as I see Google Sketchup :)

Hi Pilou,

> PS So Viacad can import a polygonal file inside
> its system without problem?

You can import a polygonal file into ViaCAD but it results in a mesh object - it's a separate category of object than a NURBS object and has somewhat different behavior, like for example you can't use a mesh object to do a boolean with I think.

- Michael

Tahks!