Hi Marc,

> Maybe small icons before 'curves', 'surfaces' could be intuitive.
> It could be the same icons than in the construct tabs but
> smaller, like the color swatches.

It would be cool, but there is only a very small space available there for the icons, they need to fit within about 16 pixels of height...

I'm not very optimistic about being able to shrink those images down to that small of a level and still have them look good.

- Michael

Some more progress on the scene browser styles section:



When some objects of a given category are mixed with some hidden and some shown, you'll get a "mixed status" half-eye which you can see there for Red in this case.

If there are no objects that belong in a particular category, the text for that category will be grayed out. This indicates that you can't click to hide/show objects on that one since there are no objects associated with that slot.

The ring around the outside of the Magenta swatch indicates that is the "active style" - that is the style that is assigned to brand new objects that you draw.

If you have objects selected, you can click on the swatch to assign those objects to have that style. If nothing is selected and you click on a swatch it will make that swatch the active style, and if you right-click on a swatch it will become the active style regardless of whether objects are selected or not.


I've got right-click on the eye working for "isolate" mode (hide everything else except that slot) and it is feeling great!


Next up is selection (and isolate selection, and deselection), which right now I think will happen by clicking on the text label.

Then after that maybe some more stuff on a drop-down menu, I think the way the dropdown menu can work is that when you move your mouse over the line, a drop-down arrow will appear on the far right side and you'll be able to click there to pop open a menu.

Anyway, it seems to be coming along quite well with a lot of functionality embedded in a streamlined UI.

- Michael

And maybe you can have an another option if the "half eye" is left or right

Hi Pilou, is the half being on the left or right an important thing for you?

I don't think there will be a checkbox option for that, but the "half eye" comes from an image named VisibleMixed.png, which like all the other icons in MoI is in the \ui subfolder.

So if you want to have the other half instead, you can edit that PNG file in an image processing program however you would like...

- Michael

No, no it's just for have the possibility for you of a practical new sub section of selection of something, not for me :)

Hi Pilou - I see what you mean now, another possible state to use... But I think I would try to avoid that since they would look so similar.

I was thinking maybe half an eye on the left meant something bad in France so you wanted to change it! :)

- Michael

No politic don't go in such little point :) Only egyptian eye :D
So make 4 divisions then no jealous :)

Ooooooooooooo right clicking, thought that was a no no for moi for easy tablet use!!;-) Sounds good though. I've got a cintiq 12wx at home which i need to dust off and start using with moi. Think i had a quick go when i first got it but that was before i really got into MOI so don't think i gave it a fair crack, might have another go tonight if i've time. It's a bit of a hassle setting it all up they market it as though it's the easiest think in the world but for me there are too many wires and boxes if your not using it at a propper desk. Anyway that's a bit OT.

I take it the styles pane will scroll when it reaches its screen limit?

All sounding great so far

Hi Rob, well the main way I figure is that adding in some extra functions with right-click does not suddenly make all the other functions in MoI that work well with a tablet stop working...

Basically those will be shortcut methods, there will still be several other ways of getting similar results like just selecting objects and then using the regular "Hide" command.

I do generally try to avoid relying on right-clicks for the most basic functions, but for shortcuts and generally more advanced functions it is not something that I worry about as much.

As time goes on and more advanced functions are added, it won't be that unusual for there to be some more stuff on right clicks.

Pretty much the main other choice would be to not have those particular functions in there at all, and it is hard to see how that is a better situation.


> I take it the styles pane will scroll when it reaches its screen limit?

Yup!

- Michael

Oh yeah i agree of course - im only messing!

Hi Michael,

So far it sounds and looks good, but until we have a play I can't comment, especially when you've been using the 256 layer system for years, it will be very interesting.
The system looks and sounds very straight forward, À la cad\graphics 'layer' system.

I was just going through in my mind on how I would use the system, maybe assign all curves used for construction as one style, construction surfaces as another and the rest for assembled solid bodies, I guess that will be it's most simplistic use.
In saying that, I'm trying visualise MoI with curves, surfaces and solids in colour, could you give us an actual screen shot of some of these objects together in colour, just to see the intensity you have planned for the colours, or haven't you got to that stage yet ? Like a trailer for an up and coming epic Movie :)

Cheers

Hi Michael,

It's evoluting really well.
Like Danny I was wondering about the colours of objects and have two questions:

- Will it be possible to temporarily turn style colours off to have a more uniform preview of the shapes ?
- And I like the active style square and the right click attribution process but, apart from looking at the shapes colours, is there a way to see what is the selected shape style while (still) seeing the "active" style that will be applied to the next shape ?

- Michel

+1 for the temporary disable colours.

I forgot to say im really impressed that we can apply styles to faces that is going to be a real time saver! On a related note will it be possible to apply a style to a profile that will be used for sweeping so that the profiles style will be used for the sweep object? Also will we be able to sweep several grouped profiles at once along a path? Say in the example here I have a profile for a wall which will be swept along a path. I have one style for brick material (yellow in this case) and another for plaster (black line/grey solid) can i group these and then do a sweep and the sweep object retains the colours/styles of the original profiles?












Cheers
Rob

Hi Danny,

> I was just going through in my mind on how I would use
> the system, maybe assign all curves used for construction
> as one style, construction surfaces as another and the rest
> for assembled solid bodies, I guess that will be it's most
> simplistic use.

Actually for such a basic thing you should be able to use the "Types" section of the browser for that, without needing to set up any styles.

When you expand out "Types", it has slots in there for things like "Curves", "Solids", etc... , which will let you do things like "hide all curves" by clicking on the eye on the Curves line.


> In saying that, I'm trying visualise MoI with curves, surfaces and
> solids in colour, could you give us an actual screen shot of some
> of these objects together in colour, just to see the intensity you
> have planned for the colours, or haven't you got to that stage yet ?

I haven't quite got that part finished yet, I've just done some experiments. It looks like I am going to need to adjust the lighting to handle colored objects better since they tend to be too dark with the regular matte type display that MoI currently uses.

- Michael

Hi Michel,

> - Will it be possible to temporarily turn style colours off to
> have a more uniform preview of the shapes ?

This is something that I want to add in, but it probably won't make it in until v3.

I'd like to put a "display mode" type dropdown under the View palette on the side pane, that would let you switch between some different modes like "Standard", "Shiny blue", "Zebra", etc... Also probably a checkbox to temporarily turn off the display of edges.


> - And I like the active style square and the right click
> attribution process but, apart from looking at the shapes
> colours, is there a way to see what is the selected shape style
> while (still) seeing the "active" style that will be applied to
> the next shape ?

Yeah, the style of the current selection is available in a different location - in the object properties panel here:



Also a style picker will pop out from there if you click on that line, so that gives a way to assign a style to selected objects even if the browser is closed. But if the browser is open probably you'll want to click on the swatch to do it instead.

Right now the browser does not have anything within it that changes due to object selection (it updates when objects are created or hidden/shown), instead the object properties panel is the thing that updates in response to selection, at least for now.

- Michael

> On a related note will it be possible to apply a
> style to a profile that will be used for sweeping so
> that the profiles style will be used for the sweep object?

At the moment it does not work like that - the sweep is considered to be a "new created object", and gets assigned to have the current active style for new objects.

I'm not so sure that it would be good to change that, it can actually be useful to have the ability to organize things by setting the active style before running a command that generates a new shape like that from curves, so that you control where the output goes to.

Things like booleans where you are slicing up an already existing surface are different, those do inherit the same style as the original surface it was cut from. But sweeping is quite a bit different than cutting.

Also it is possible to sweep using many profiles for different stations along the same sweep, like this for example:


Each of those curves could have a different style associated to it, so what should be the style assigned to the generated shape if that was the case?



> Also will we be able to sweep several grouped profiles at once along a path?

No, grouping does not change how any command will process shapes currently. That's something that I would like to try to add in the future but it will involve changes to each individual command to make it recognize that stuff so it may be a while before that can happen.

The current focus for these new tools are to give you a way to do object management tasks like hiding, showing, or selecting some predefined sets of objects, it isn't going to be about changing how individual commands work for now.

- Michael

That's no bother. I just thought having the sweep inherit the splines colours (1st group selected only) that it might save time so you wouldn't then have to then edit each instance of the swept object manually to apply more than one colour to it. Just a suggestion.

Cheers

Well, made some more progress on the scene browser. I've got the types section working now.

This will be the section that allows you to work with sets of objects based on their types, like "hide all curves", "isolate all solids", etc...




There are also 2 sub-sections within it, "Selected", and "Unselected", which allow you to target all objects of a specific type that are also currently selected or unselected.



That allows for some pretty detailed kinds of filtering involving the selection, things like "isolate only the curves from the current mixed selection".

In the future there can be some other sub-sections in here like "Locked" and "Unlocked", to enable things like "Hide all locked objects" really easily.

- Michael

Looking good Michael.

But, can I ask that the eye icons are indented to the same level, please? Like this:




Makes scanning the list much easier.

Cheers.

Hi Tony, I'll have to think about that, I don't really know how that would work with a higher level of nesting like groups will be able to have.

For example something like this:



I don't know if that would work to stick the eyes right in the middle of all that structure, I guess they would have to go over top of some of the tree connector spots, and they would kind of be sprinkled all over the place...

I think there is going to be an advantage to having the eye be all the way to the left, since it will make that kind of primary action of hide/show be the most accessible thing to hit with your mouse and in a more uniform spot.

It also seems to be really common in other hide/show control systems to have those kinds of visibility control be arranged in a single column, for example take a look at Photoshop with nested layers - the eyes don't nest there, they stay in one column even when there is a sub-structure that nests down.

Do you know of another program that puts the controls indented like you're showing there? If so could you show me a screenshot of how they handle it with more levels of nesting?

- Michael