Now that we've got text annotations that are fixed in the model space, they're useful for mocking up legends in product design work — getting a first pass at e.g. control spacing to make sure there's room for the labels as well as for folks to use the physical controls. That said, performance is really terrible once you have a thousand or so labels on a model. The model in the screenshot is about 7,000 objects, so not light weight, of which about 1700 are annotations. When I hide the annotations, the frame rate jumps by an order of magnitude. I can share the actual model if it's useful, but there's nothing particularly special going on. This might be a useful area to do some perf tuning in v5 — all the visible annotations here are in a single plane, and it feels like a bit of optimization should get rid of almost all the overhead there.

Unrelated, little more accuracy in line hiding would also be nice — I often see hidden geometry that's close by showing through objects even when show hidden lines is off.. I've tweaked the view settings, but they don't seem to change it; would be happy to have the option of taking a bit more perf hit for accuracy there.

Hi Cuboctahedron, yes the annotations are intended for pretty lightweight markup duty currently, like having 30 or so of them to make a light shop drawing PDF. It won't work well currently to have so many of them in a single model like you've got there especially with model units type scaling behavior.

Currently text with model units scaling is drawn with a pretty dense triangle mesh and when you have a lot of them it's too heavy and performance suffers.

I have several ideas on how to improve this when the text is small on screen, if you can please send me the .3dm model file of your heavy model with poor annotation text performance that would help when I'm testing it out for improvements in v5. Please send a file sharing link to me at moi@moi3d.com , thanks!

- Michael

Sent! And yeah, that totally makes sense — would be happy to have a config setting to change the text meshing angle/quality, even if it's not exposed in the UI etc. for a while.

This is fully fixed in v5 and it's making my life so much easier! Thank you!

Hi Cuboctahedron, that's great news! You're welcome.

There was quite a bit of text layout that was being done during the rendering and it was more expensive than I had realized. That was the main culprit.

- Michael