Just noticed that the boolean face retains the style of the original object!!! By bad.

Hi Burr, yup when you do a boolean the styles of the original objects are preserved.

That's so you can do things like construct a knob, assign it the style you want to render with at the end, then replicate the knob, then do a boolean with a larger base object and through all those steps the styles are preserved.

So because of that you can have a chance to set your style early on and have it replicate through various modeling steps so that you don't have to do it all at the end by picking possibly a whole bunch of little fragments, although you can still do it that way if you want.

I am going to try and put in an option so that you can turn that off if you want though, since some people are used to working in other systems that do not allow having different styles on child objects.

- Michael

I must have been mistaken. I thought I remembered a thread with Danny where the Booleans were taking on the style of "One", and merging....But I prefer the way it is, so no request from me.

Thanks

Hi Michael,

> I can't really think of a case where black
> edges would show discrepancies better.
> Do you have an example where you can show that?

I haven't got a copy of colored MoI to see the difference, so this is a rough indication of what I mean.
Small surfaces are easily seen in the model with the black edges.



> Notice that having the edges colored,
> when an object is selected there is
> still some visual indicator of its style.

Assuming the edges are black, Is it possible upon selection the edges show the style colour, same goes for wireframe display.

> It also just generally opens the door for
> more kinds of styling in the future like possibly
> being able to have styles that had additional
> stuff that could affect edges like brush
> strokes or sketch-like drawing styles.

That's all good stuff, that would be for a final visual static output, I wouldn't be modeling with sketchy style edges.
I think when you implement these thats when we can apply colors and line styles to the edges.

> If edges did not get assigned the same style
> when setting the style of a selected solid, then
> the style property for that solid would be
> reported as "Various styles", since it would
> have faces on one style and edges on another
> style - that's not bad to be able to set manually
> but it is not a good thing to do by default.

The way you have Booleans set up by default this will happen anyway, won't it ?

Just a quick question on this, when selecting multi coloured bodies will the edges show up the colour of the surface it represents ?
what happens to the shared edge of 2 different coloured surfaces ?

> But today I should be working on some methods
> to override the default, so that you could have
> either faces or edges displayed in a fixed color
> of your choice rather than showing in their style color.

That's great Michael, thanks!

Working with other 3d modelers, I hear their comments, especially when using new software, and maybe other users on the forum are reading this thread are saying, 'what's the big deal' but using something for 8 to 12 hrs straight, the little things start to stand out and then become annoying. Having those options will please a lot of users, I think.

Can't wait for the release, It reminds me as kid when we got rid of the B&W TV and got a colour :)

Cheers

Hi Danny,

> I haven't got a copy of colored MoI to see the difference, so
> this is a rough indication of what I mean.
> Small surfaces are easily seen in the model with the black edges.

I guess it could possibly be a problem in a few particular areas, but it doesn't seem to be that bad with the default lighting, which looks like this in MoI:



Selecting an object causes the surfaces to become much brighter, which changes the contrast with the edges by quite a bit:




I'll make the option available so you can switch it if you want, but it just does not seem to be a big enough problem to have it set up that way by default though.

Also in the 3D view as you move around shading will change, which helps to make the edges to be seen.


> Assuming the edges are black, Is it possible upon selection
> the edges show the style colour, same goes for wireframe display.

That sounds kind of strange, it would probably be difficult to come up with a sane UI for controlling options for that level of things mutating and changing with different states.

It's a much more simple situation when wireframe looks the same as the current edge display.


> That's all good stuff, that would be for a final visual static output,
> I wouldn't be modeling with sketchy style edges.

Even so you'll probably want to be able to see something close to the final rendered output in a real-time view so you can do things like adjust lights, fine tune the view angle, etc... which are good to do in a real time display.

So there are definitely benefits to having things able to be set up in the working view to display like that, even if you are not going to be using it for full time modeling.


> I think when you implement these thats when we can apply
> colors and line styles to the edges.

It's better to have things set up now to support it, that way when it comes time to add those things they will fit in more naturally rather than needing to kind of rip out an incompatible system and replace it.


> The way you have Booleans set up by default this will happen
> anyway, won't it ?

It will, but at the boolean time. It would be very strange for it to happen at "style assignment" time instead. (to get back a current style property of "Various styles" after having just assigned Style = Red to a solid for example).


> Just a quick question on this, when selecting multi coloured
> bodies will the edges show up the colour of the surface it represents ?
> what happens to the shared edge of 2 different coloured surfaces ?

Edges don't really "represent" a surface, they are another kind of entity that makes up a solid just like surfaces are one kind of entity.

Edges in MoI have their own style properties assigned to them, so when you edit a face and change the face's style, it doesn't change the edge style, those are separate things.


> Having those options will please a lot of users, I think

Yeah, I think with the options that I am adding now you should be able to get what you want.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> That sounds kind of strange, it would probably
> be difficult to come up with a sane UI for
> controlling options for that level of things
> mutating and changing with different states.

This is how it works in NX.



-

Hi Danny, what happens in NX if you hide just some of the faces? Do some of the edges change color but not all of them?

What happens in NX if you have some faces colored differently than others, what does it do for the wire colors in that case?

- Michael

Hello.....

Below is SWX behaviour :

And below is another one :

So it looks like in SW the edges cant be grouped seperatly by styling and various other aspects? just always black?

Hi Burr....

As I know YES.
Only in shaded mode the black edge invisible.
SW does not have layer mechanism. Layer is only for 2D drawing not 3D.

-Anis

Hi Michael,

> what happens in NX if you hide just some of the faces?
> Do some of the edges change color but not all of them?

That's one thing with NX, once an object is a solid or joined surfaces you can't hide individual faces, NX considers the object as one entity.
There is away around this so I can answer your question.
The edges display the same as the gif I posted previously.

> What happens in NX if you have some faces colored differently
> than others, what does it do for the wire colors in that case?

You have to remember that the colours in NX are not associated with layers, they are a separate thing altogether.
You might find this a bit unorthodox or strange.
When you create a cube in NX the colour of the solid is what has been set as default, let's say Red.
To change the colour you select the cube and change it to green then, shaded=green with black edges, wireframe=green edges.
If I change one face to blue then, shaded=green and blue with black edges, wireframe is still green.
If I select all faces not the solid (this is a filtered state of selection) and change all the faces to blue then, shaded=blue with black edges, wireframe=green.
I hope your following this :S
So applying a different colour to a face is like having a ruby and painting the facets yellow, the underlying ruby is still red.
The same goes with a separate surface, you can choose to change the colour of the surface or change the colour of the surface face, believe or not there is a difference.

You even have the option to do all the above and have any colour for edges in the shaded state as well, you could get hung up in all this and not get your job finished :)

This all comes under the Visualisation window.

Cheers
~Danny~

Hi Danny,

> That's one thing with NX, once an object is a solid or joined
> surfaces you can't hide individual faces, NX considers the
> object as one entity. There is away around this so I can answer
> your question.

I guess that's why being able to name edges and so forth is feeling odd to you.

But the advantage is that since MoI can apply all regular object attributes to edges and faces, it does not need to have any kind of special "way around" it - all the normal tools such as Hide, Lock, selecting or hiding things with the scene browser, etc... all just work on edges or faces.

That helps provide a lot of flexibility while at the same time keeping the UI easy to use, since you don't have to use special "face tools" to colorize faces, you just use the regular tools for any of these.

For example in MoI if you want to be able to hide some partial chunk of a complex solid, you can do that by selecting the faces and assign a name - now that name will be available in the scene browser and you can click on the eye to turn that chunk on or off with one click. That would leave the edges still visible which may be kind of handy but if you wanted the edges in that area to hide as well you could assign them to the same name and then both the faces and the wires in that area would be controlled by that scene browser entry.

That's possible in MoI with the same UI controlling it all because of this ability to assign regular object properties to faces and edges...


I'm getting kind of a headache trying to follow what you are describing for NX, sorry... ;)


- Michael

Hi Danny, also I've got the options working now for being able to change how edges are displayed.

There will be a new setting for this under Options / View :



There are 2 choices under the drop-downs there: "By style", and "Fixed color".

The default is "By style" which means that edges and surfaces will display in their style color.

If you set it to the "Fixed color" option, then a swatch will appear which you can adjust:



When the "Fixed color" option is set, all edges or surfaces will use this specified color rather than being drawn in their style color.

So that will enable you to get edges displayed in black always if you want.

- Michael

Yep, they're the options we're looking for :) good stuff there Michael.

How will "Fixed color" work , can we still change colours of edges or surfaces if we want to, if we choose this option ?
Are the "Fixed color" edges of a Red cube still style red ?

---------
~Danny~

Exactly what I had in mind. Thank you very much, Michael.

Danny, I'm pretty sure these are simply display options, so the surfaces and edges are still being assigned styles as they normally would, but we can now override the color component of those styles when displaying the surfaces / edges.

shadow shadow shadow sun path diagram :)

Hi Danny,

> How will "Fixed color" work , can we still change colours of
> edges or surfaces if we want to, if we choose this option ?

It's like vodkamartini mentioned above - you can still assign things to have different styles the same as before, it just alters the display only so that the display will show your fixed color choice rather than showing the style color as it normally does.

Exports are not affected, so for example if you export to OBJ format styles will be used for the materials saved in the OBJ file same as currently.


> Are the "Fixed color" edges of a Red cube still style red ?

Yes, everything still maintains the same property values as before, it just purely overrides the display.

- Michael