Hi,

I would be great to have a visual hint to know when objects are selected inside a larger object.

Regards,

Marc

Hi Marc, any ideas on what it would look like?

One difficulty is it is hard for the display code to differentiate between the case of an object completely contained inside another one versus an object just behind another one.

I guess that a different kind of transparent type view could help in this area.


One thing that is somewhat related - when you select an object with window select, the edges will flash briefly (on top of everything), if you watch for that you can kind of get an indication that your window select hit something inside.

- Michael

Hi, Michael,
I was introduced to 3-D modelling via Deskartes, I never went with the program but it did have an interesting slider that would make the display disappear as you ran it across the screen exposing the edges of internal objects. I have never seen it in another program and I have no idea if it is dificult to code , but it was useful.

regards Tim .

Hi Michael,

Maybe edges could be highlighted "over" the external surface, a bit like the yellow curves.

"One difficulty is it is hard for the display code to differentiate between the case of an object completely contained inside another one versus an object just behind another one"

I think that it would be practical if the same behavior could apply to hidden objects.

Regards,

Marc

Hi Tim, re: slider to slice objects visually - that's probably not too horribly difficult to code, I think it would be possible to tell the video card to set up some clipping planes to make that happen.

The much trickier part is actually merging the controls for it into the UI - since it isn't something that most people need to do all the time, it probably isn't really going to be appropriate to just put a big slider on MoI's main screen to control it...

- Michael

Hi Marc,

> Maybe edges could be highlighted "over" the external surface, a bit like the yellow curves.

The tricky thing with this is that it can also change the display of just simple objects that are not obscured.

For example selecting just a box might look something like this:



The problem is having stuff that is normally hidden get accented too much tends to interfere with depth perception of the object.

Maybe drawing the "hidden edges" (the faint dashed lines) in a slightly different style for selected objects would work. But it is kind of difficult to find a way that is distinctive from regular hidden-line but also not too heavily accented to avoid the depth perception problem. I just experimented with a couple of different variations on this, but so far I haven't found a very satisfying method, things seem to be too faint if drawn in a faint version of the selected color, or stand out too much if drawn at full opacity with the regular selected color...

The second one (draw hidden lines at full opacity with selected color) does a good job of identifying hidden selected objects:



But still doesn't look good to me for the regular single selected object case:



Maybe doing a more significant change to the dash pattern itself beyond just the whole color would be good, like possibly alternating between black and a faint yellow... It is harder to mess around with that though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

If it was like your example of the yellow dotted lines inside the gray box it would be great!
But if this would make the regular hidden lines like that, then I agree it's not good.

And also circles and round objects have no outline edges If I understand correctly.

Maybe for solids it could be faces that shows in a faint tint, just enough to have an hint of the occluded set.

Regards,

Marc

Hi Marc,

> If it was like your example of the yellow dotted lines inside the
> gray box it would be great! But if this would make the regular hidden
> lines like that, then I agree it's not good.

That's the tricky part - both these things go together as a package. There isn't any good way for me to distinguish "interior contained object hidden edges" versus "regular hidden edges" to treat them different from one another, at least not at the speed that would be required for display purposes.

I tried this same method on a more complex object and it really gets messy there:




> And also circles and round objects have no outline edges If I understand correctly.

Not around their silhouette, but they will contain at least one "seam" edge on it, like on a sphere there is one edge where the edges of the sphere's surface touch one another (kind of like a sheet of paper that has been rolled up).


> Maybe for solids it could be faces that shows in a faint tint, just enough to
> have an hint of the occluded set.

Yeah, this would be basically a kind of "transparent object" type display, where you could see surfaces through other surfaces. Right now there is a kind of transparent feel to the display, but it only involves the hidden edges being displayed, not surfaces.

I'd like to add this kind of different transparent display at some point in the future, but it will be a fair amount of work.

Either that or a wireframe mode will probably be the real solution to this problem.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Yes, a wireframe mode along with visual sign to see selection would be a good solution.
Maybe objects could turn in shade mode they are added to the selection set.

In any case, it shouldn't bloat the fantastic display engine you have developed.

Regard,

Marc