Hi Brian,

> With regard to printed output, with a 5 year old Brother MFC laser printer, Michael's test_silhouette.pdf is superb,
> (although it looks a little too "harsh" or "sharp" on my samsung monitor, in my opinion.) I gather it is "10X?

Yeah it seems to be fairly hard to really clearly see small differences in line weight on the monitor, the printer just has such a finer grained resolution than the monitor.

So probably there won't be any one single "one size fits all purposes" line weights, different kinds of uses will probably benefit from different settings.

Over here just the screen display between Adobe Reader and Adobe Illustrator with the same line weights actually looks fairly different...

- Michael

Hi Brian,

> Is there, or would it be beneficial, to have an on screen "print preview" of how the pdf would look in
> a printed version? Laserjet? Inkjet?

It would definitely be nice to have that, but I have to balance that against how much development time it would take and also how much actual real life usefulness that it would provide.

Also for things like line weights for printing you really can't entirely judge 100% what the print will look like from the on screen display, I think you have to actually make some printouts to really see it.

So I thinking that probably an on screen preview of the hidden lines probably won't happen for this release.



> Or is the target another software program?

Yeah, pretty much - if you just want to do a print then the other program can be the Adobe Reader PDF viewer program. If you want to adjust things then the other program would be a 2D illustration program like Adobe Illustrator / Corel Draw / Xara / Inkscape / etc...

- Michael

Hi ed,

> <....>
> Furthermore if I want to change some lines styles of a make 2d output

Right now this kind of thing with changing line styles for individual objects won't really work in MoI since MoI doesn't have settable line styles yet for the regular modeling area.

But that does help me understand what you'd want that for - you kind of rough out the shape in 3D and then convert that to a 2D drawing and then continue working on your drawing just as if you were in a 2D CAD program doing 2D drawing only after that, is that basically correct?

If you wanted to do that in MoI you could just save out to any of .ai /.pdf /.dxf format and then just open that file back into MoI and then do 2D drawing on top of it.

- Michael

Dang!
Rather excellent!


This might go well with two tone lightning like Mike's example




Tweaking colors or vectorise the bitmap would be easy afterward.




Ikea plans on the fly!!!







Jolly good!

Marc

> What filters did you use?

Martin, the fill layer was processed using one of PS's built-in "Artistic" filters. This gives the fill a painted look.
The outlines were Gaussian blurred a little and then contrast was applied to re-sharpen the result.
I used an Eye-Candy "Jiggle" filter to give it all a non-computer-made 'hand' look. You can also use PS's stock "Distort/Ripple" filter on a low setting.


Michael, will this type of outlining output work in Perspective, Parallel and Iso modes?

"... you kind of rough out the shape in 3D and then convert that to a 2D drawing and then continue working on your drawing..."

Yes! ok, I think I can live importing back the pdf. Only one question, I don't understand yet if the pdf will preserve both the objects name and styles.

Hi Mike,

> Michael, will this type of outlining output work in Perspective, Parallel and Iso modes?

Yeah all of these things including the accented silhouettes will work in any kind of view mode.

The main kind of thing that will have problems overall are details that are pretty tiny in size in relation to the whole object being processed. Much of the hidden/visible determination is done with a pixel-like depth map and if curves are little enough that they only occupy one or a couple of pixels in the depth map they will get kind of clumped together.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>What is the line weight that you used for the small size there?

I used 0.15 mm for the Default lines and 0.45 mm for the Silhouette lines and only cared about a good screen display.

Hi Ed,

> Only one question, I don't understand yet if the pdf will preserve both the objects name and styles.

No unfortunately it won't preserve those at least not currently.

I'll see about making some additional command to generate the hidden line output directly inside of MoI. I'm not sure if that will be in this next beta yet or not though.

It might not work so well to modify the silhouette command to do that since silhouettes can be used for other purposes as well like making parting lines for mold making.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> Yeah I think that will be possible. Probably by default the hidden lines on PDF export will not be displayed but I'll put in an option for having them and when they are enabled it would make sense to give them a faint dashed line style in the PDF file as well I think.

Will you keep this option on final release, or you drop it? In some cases this can be quite usefull. If it means no extra work i suggest you keep.

Another question, will you consider making a 3D PDF export, or it is a monster task? Maybe for v4 : ))

Carlos

Hi Carlos,

> Will you keep this option on final release, or you drop it? In some cases this can be
> quite usefull. If it means no extra work i suggest you keep.

I am still planning on having that (optional dashed hidden lines), in fact it's what I've been working on just today. I've attached a sample PDF, it looks like this:







This one has different layers in the PDF for: Outlines, Background image, Hidden lines, visible lines on their original style, and silhouettes. I think those will be the various kinds of things that can be generated. Next up I'll be planning the UI to control things.



> Another question, will you consider making a 3D PDF export, or it is a monster task? Maybe for v4 : ))

Right now I don't have any plans for a 3D PDF export, it's an entirely different thing from 2D PDF and I don't really know a lot of details about it. I think some kind of library is needed to make them and it's kind of a messy situation because Adobe decided to basically get rid of their own library for 3D PDF support and sold it off to some separate company or something like that, it's a bit confusing what's going on with it.

At any rate, it doesn't really have anything to do with the regular 2D PDF work that I'm doing now.

- Michael

Does the internal "large black lines" can be disable and can be parametered? (different size)

Hi Pilou,

> Does the internal "large black lines" can be disable

Yup, they can be disabled in Adobe Viewer by going to the Layers control and clicking the little eye icon to turn off the layer for "Silhouettes".

I'm also planning on having an option at export time to control whether those are generated or not.



> and can be parametered? (different size)

I also want to have an option at export time to control that as well. The specifics of the export UI haven't been finished yet, that will probably be the next thing that I work on.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

The internal dashed line are just perfect. Well done.


>> Does the internal "large black lines" can be disable

> Yup, they can be disabled in Adobe Viewer by going to the Layers control and clicking the little eye icon to turn off the layer for "Silhouettes".

> I'm also planning on having an option at export time to control whether those are generated or not.

This is great - be able to turn them off on export time - since i'm not big fan of it, probably never will use it.


Concerning the 3D PDF export: Its a shame that Adobe is messing with it, since its a well spread file format and very usefull. I'm using Simlab and its great, but i've to go trought Modo (nurbs > polygons, an extra step).

Thanks.

Carlos

Hi Michael,

In which scale will be the export? Real scale and screen scale?

What do you think about setting the scale on the export dialog window, like 1:1, 1:5, 1:20, 2:5?

Could be very usefull to dimensioning in other application. Don't know if this will be usefull for somebody else.

Carlos

Hi Carlos,

> In which scale will be the export? Real scale and screen scale?

Currently it works the same as the already existing wireframe PDF and AI output - there's a "Fit to page" option which if enabled centers the output on the printed page and scales it to fill the page. All the examples that I've posted here are done that way.

If "Fit to page" is turned off, then it will preserve the existing unit size. For PDF and AI output that will involve scaling to the native PDF/AI "points" units if your current units are millimeters, centimeters, or inches, otherwise it will scale things up by 20 times if you have any other kinds of units set which deviate highly in scale from a printed "point" (1/72 of an inch).

For DXF it just preserves units 1:1.


> What do you think about setting the scale on the export dialog window, like 1:1, 1:5, 1:20, 2:5?

Maybe... Probably every application that you're importing into will have some function in it to scale the objects if you need that though.

Both AI and PDF file formats are heavily based around "point" units and printed page bounds though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

In Illustrator there's a 5 meters page limit, so bigger elements could be problematic to import and hard to be accurate when dimensioning, so Architectural drawing could be hard. Yes, we can rescale the drawing inside the application, but need to do it over and over for each view.

I was thinking on my workflow as i use an Illustrator plugin called CadTools from Hot Door as their Dimensioning Tool can dimension with scale.

From what i can see setting a scale on export could lead to some problems.

Carlos

Hi Carlos,

> I was thinking on my workflow as i use an Illustrator plugin called CadTools from Hot Door as their
> Dimensioning Tool can dimension with scale.

How does CadTools work for knowing what sizes to apply for units like meters or feet when it is making dimensions?

Is it possible to do something like calibrate it to a single line somewhere on the page that has a known length?

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> How does CadTools work for knowing what sizes to apply for units like meters or feet when it is making dimensions?

Don't know if i understand your question, anyway, on the Dimensioning Tool Preferences i set the scale, like 1:5, and the Dimensioning Tool put the dimensions accordnly, so when dimensioning, for ex. a 1 meter line, the Tool write 5 meters.


> Is it possible to do something like calibrate it to a single line somewhere on the page that has a known length?

Again, i'm not sure if i'm following, but yes, if the exported view brings that specific information, and the drawing respect it, so yes. Or could bring a caption like Scale 1:5.

Carlos

Hi Carlos,

> Don't know if i understand your question, anyway, on the Dimensioning Tool Preferences
> i set the scale, like 1:5, and the Dimensioning Tool put the dimensions accordnly, so when
> dimensioning, for ex. a 1 meter line, the Tool write 5 meters.

How do you get a 1 meter line to start with, does it have to measure 1 meter in page size, shooting way out past the printed page boundaries?



> Again, i'm not sure if i'm following, but yes, if the exported view brings that specific information, and the
> drawing respect it, so yes. Or could bring a caption like Scale 1:5.

As far as I know there isn't any particular way to attach a scale factor value to a "view", in Illustrator you're basically working on a printed page that's contained within a sheet of paper and the units that geometry have are in "points" units on that page with 1 point = 1/72 of an inch.

re: calibration - I was thinking that maybe with CadTools you could pick a line and tell it: "This line is 5 meters long", and then it would know what scale to use. I guess it does not work like that though.

- Michael