I have two curves here, at different heights but this is the top down view.

1. It is hard for me to tell the light grey curve from the medium grey background - there isn't enough contrast, especially when using my laptop.

2. It's hard for me to tell the two curves apart as I edit one of them. Can you tell from this screenshot which one I am editing?



Andy

Hi Andy, yes it is definitely hard to see with those colors. The color of the curve is set by its style so I would recommend changing that to not be light grey so that you can see it better.

Or if you want to keep the curves colored light grey you can change the viewport background color instead under Options > View > Colors > "Background color" :



- Michael

That's good - but do you think the default colors make sense as the defaults? Andy

This is even harder to see. I've changed to style of the line to red but all it did was change the color of the control points. Changing the background color won't help here because it's the body of the part behind it. So I have to change the part color?



Oh - it seems the line is red but only in 3D view where it is not obscured by the top of the part. That doesn't help when I am trying to set the profile of the curve from above and the curve is inside the part.

Wouldn't it be more user-friendly just to automatically use a contrasting highlight color for curves that are currently being edited and use that color in all views?

Andy

Hi Andy, the default colors do not include a light grey. The default styles are like this:



- Michael

I didn't change anything - this is an imported STEP file - does that affect the styles? Andy

Hi Andy,

> This is even harder to see. I've changed to style of the line to red but all it did was
> change the color of the control points

Can you post the .3dm model file with the line that has style=red but is not being displayed as red?


re:
> Wouldn't it be more user-friendly just to automatically use a contrasting highlight color
> for curves that are currently being edited

No, it's generally a difficult thing to try and automatically choose colors. MoI is designed to use the colors that you tell it to use rather than cooking up things on its own.

Have you possibly set the option in moi.ini to draw curves as a fixed color instead of by their styles?

- Michael

Hi Andy,

re:
> I didn't change anything - this is an imported STEP file - does that affect the styles? Andy

Yes, STEP files can contain their own color information and apparently your file has colors in it that are light grey.

If you don't like that then you can change them after you load it.

- Michael

I don't understand this. When I select a curve it is highlighted in bright yellow. As soon as I move a control point it goes back to it's line color. Why not just keep it as bright yellow while the control points are being adjusted?

Andy

Hi Andy, the bright yellow color is for the selection state. When the curve is bright yellow that means the curve as a whole is selected.

If you then click and drag on a control point, selection shifts to the control point and away from the curve as a whole resulting in what you describe.


> Why not just keep it as bright yellow while the control points are being adjusted?

Because the bright yellow is for showing selection, it's not tied to "control points being adjusted".

- Michael

OK, so if the bright yellow is built into the application for selection why can't there also be a color for the line being edited by control points, that the user can set?

I don't want to change the color of a line permanently or change the background color permanently, I just want to be able to see the line while I am editing it's shape. You already do that for selection so why not for this specific situation?

Andy

Hi Andy,

> OK, so if the bright yellow is built into the application for selection why can't there also be a color
> for the line being edited by control points, that the user can set?

Because it tends to be confusing and chaotic to have colors changing around all the time for all kinds of different states. Each one of these special colors would make it more possible to clash with colors you have chosen.

So the focus in MoI is to only do a color switch to indicate selection and not any other kinds of states.

If you can't see the line because of its color I would recommend changing the color to something other than light grey.

Also another thing that can make it easier to see what's going on with a particular object is to hide other objects. You can do that by selecting the line you want to edit and then right-click on the Edit > Hide button. That will trigger an "isolate" which will hide everything other than the selected objects. You can trigger it a second time when you're done to restore visibility to its pre-isolate state.

- Michael