Hi lyes

> HI Michael nice one i can't wait for color glass and reflection
> here is miror reflection in moi

It's fun that you've got some ways to get these render effects with the current toolset!

I would like to add glass and reflection in the future at some point, but those effects tend to be more difficult and may possibly require certain kinds of newer video cards and things like that.

Right now one nice feature of MoI is that it runs well even on much older video cards and for a while yet I still want to preserve that.

- Michael

Why not coding environements maps instead of a new light system?
Cause env maps can virtually emulate any light system or I am wrong?
Maybe its harder to code I dont know :)
But you could do a 1 shot 2 kills with env maps, light system + fake reflections.

Hi PaQ,

> How did you resolve the black and white surface ?

It's not resolved yet. I'm not sure yet if it will be fully resolved for v2 or not, it may need something like being able to set separate colors in a style for wires and surfaces which I may not be able to finish for v2.


> Will the black have dark gray wireframe ?

I think probably the in-viewport display of the surface color will get limited to a dark gray and the wireframe will remain unlimited and stay at the style color. But I haven't really focused on that yet.


> And how about the white surface ? (white wireframe will be more less invisible).

No, that actually seems to be fine because most areas have shading:



This may get a bit worse though with specular highlights added, although I may try to have specular not applied to white surfaces.


> At the export, is it the surface color that will be taked
> into account to define the diffuse, or the wireframe color
> from the style ?

It's the surface color which right now is the same as the wire color, they are both currently defined by a single color value that belongs to a style.

The only exception is when you have a style with pure black as the color (which is the default in the 2D sense of black ink for printing lines and text) the surface color will instead be taken as white.


> For the moment, it seems that the wireframe color = surface
> color + a little bright boost. Is it something automated when
>you choose a color for a style ?

No, that's just an optical illusion - there is no brightness applied to the wires, instead they just appear to have that since the surfaces get darkened due to shading.

The wires that you see in that previous screenshot are all just at the pure shade color, no adjustments.


> Did you made some test with only black wireframe ?

No, not yet.


> As there is some kind of soft specular on the surface, even
> a black surface + black wireframe will still be 'readable' I guess.

A little bit better I guess but probably not enough. That will probably need to be another special case where either the surface or the wires are altered in the viewport display to be lightened slightly.

- Michael

Hi okapi,

> Regarding the object color, could there be an option
> to turn the color on for the surfaces / for surfcaes+lines /
> for lines only (with neutral surface colors).

I do have an idea that I want to have some kind of display override option, probably some kind of dropdown in the View palette, that would allow you to switch the display between some different modes like "Normal" (meaning use style color), "Matte", "Shiny Blue", "Zebra stripes", etc....

I think that would provide for the kind of thing you are mentioning here.

However, I'm not sure about finishing that up for the v2 timeframe, my current plan was to have that in v3 when I had a chance to set up a few different kinds of display options and possibly have some kind of system to set up custom modes.

So for v2 that may not be available.

One other option you could do without that would be to set up various styles so that you had different categories but set them all to have the same color. Then you can maintain your organization but without seeing colors, and then you can edit the style colors at the end to produce the output colors.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> Possibility of level of transparency by object?

Maybe in the future.... I think that's already in the wishlist.

That's a quite different area of work than what I am currently working on though - transparency requires a much different display mechanism than lighting.


> See something behind or inside can be useful for snap
> something for example!!! (Xray mode) ;)

Actually just go to View / Display hidden lines and make sure that is checked, and you'll be able to get the equivalent of an Xray mode for snapping on to hidden curves right now.

Hidden curves will be displayed with a faint dashed line style and you can snap on to them with object snaps, is that the same function that you would want from the x-ray mode?

- Michael

< Hidden curves will be displayed with a faint dashed line style and you can snap on to them with object snaps, is that the same function that you would want from the x-ray mode?
yes, and this will works when objects will have their own colors or we must choose unify colors mode?

dashed and colored would be a total madness for the eyes :D

Hi Danny,

> I've always wondered, if we really need coloured
> wireframes/edges as well as assigning names and
> styles to them, I don't see a need to do this for edges,
> unless you or someone else can convince me otherwise.

Do you mean you would want to assign names and styles to them but not have them show up in any colors?

Styles are all about colors though, so that would be kind of a mismatch to be able to assign them to a style but not have them visually reflect it - styles are meant to have a visual kind of grouping or labeling effect in general.


Really though this behavior with edge colorization is more of a setup for some longer range ideas. Like imagine if you could set in a style some properties like Brush type: "pencil sketch" or "felt tip marker", and then assigning some edges to have that style would give them that appearance.

It may help to be able to have those things in the future by having some groundwork set up earlier where edges can participate in styling.


There's also one other nice practical effect of having colored edges currently, which is that it lets you see some color on an object that has been selected with the first click to give it "whole object selection", which turns the surfaces to be displayed in the yellow selection color instead of their regular color.

For example here are a bunch of objects:



After selection, because the edge colorization does not change there is at least a hint of the style identity still able to be perceived:



- Michael

Very cool idea Michael :)
How does it deal with 2 edges same place but 2 styles? When you do boolean for example?

Hi DesuDeus,

> Cause env maps can virtually emulate any light system or I am wrong?

Yes, pretty much - that's why the new lighting system that I'm showing here does use environment mapping.


> But you could do a 1 shot 2 kills with env maps, light system + fake reflections.

Doing fake reflections is a very different thing, because it involves interactions between objects.

So for example when objects are deleted or moved, the reflection maps need to be updated and re-rendered.

That's a very significant difference in the infrastructure needed to support them.

It also tends to be difficult from a memory resource standpoint to do reflection maps on all objects, each one requires its own map which consumes video memory.

Often times for games they may have a restriction like only one or a small number of actually reflective objects, or stuff like that.

In something like MoI where you're generally creating a bunch of objects and moving them around and editing and changing them all the time, it makes some kinds of mechanisms that work well in a game not really apply very well.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> yes, and this will works when objects will have their
> own colors or we must choose unify colors mode?

Yes, it just works exactly the same as it does currently.

It may be a little harder to see the faint dashed lines with colorized surfaces, but one thing that can help with that is to just select the object you are interested in since that will change it to have the yellow selection color which is bright and the hidden lines are easier to see against that color.

- Michael

Hi DesuDeus,

> dashed and colored would be a total madness for the eyes :D

Yeah hidden lines don't get colorized by styles, they just stay at a faint gray color.

I tried colorizing them but it looked weird.

- Michael

Hi DesuDeus,

> Very cool idea Michael :)
> How does it deal with 2 edges same place but 2 styles?
> When you do boolean for example?

Well, when things combine only one of the edges is kept in the final result, the style of the final one will be whichever one was the surviving edge.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> Do you mean you would want to assign names and styles
> to them but not have them show up in any colors?

No names no colours, just black.

> Really though this behavior with edge colorization is more
> of a setup for some longer range ideas. Like imagine if you
> could set in a style some properties like Brush type:
> "pencil sketch" or "felt tip marker", and then assigning
> some edges to have that style would give them that appearance.

Nice future gazing there, I like the idea but that would be for final static visualisation, I wouldn't want to model with sketchy style edges.
An option for either or would be nice.

Keep up the good work Michael, your making it harder to use any other modeling program :)

Cheers

@Michael
I cant wait for environements maps !! look at http://auxpecker.blogspot.com/ its for Rhino and its OH MY GOD (free) awesome for viewing freeform with T-splines. And you can still model while having the environement maps. Maybe speak to auxpecker coder because he has very very good environement maps pictures that he use in Auxpecker. That would save you some time rendering environements maps.
When I say fake reflections, its just an environement map, not object reflecting another object, that's raytracing and today its too heavy to deal with in real time.

> Well, when things combine only one of the edges is kept in the final result,
> the style of the final one will be whichever one was the surviving edge.

My bad, I mean how does MoI display two lines in two different styles (blue and red for example) when they are at the same place in space?
Same for colored solids.

Hi DesuDeus,

> My bad, I mean how does MoI display two lines in two
> different styles (blue and red for example) when they are
> at the same place in space?
> Same for colored solids.

That's up to the video card to handle - items leave their z values behind when they are drawn and objects that are drawn after them only draw their pixels if they have closer z values than what is currently in the zbuffer.

It's not uncommon for 2 coincident surfaces to get slightly differing z values across their surface due to tiny round-off errors in numeric calculations, that causes something called "z-fighting" where different portions of each thing may show with a kind of patchy result.

- Michael

@Michael
Ok I got it.
The best feature that will help me is colored solids, when working with complex models its a must have :)
Auxpecker use 800px by 800px environement maps, Rhino use 512px by 512px. Its gonna be great if everyone gonne be
able to make environements maps and put them into MoI folder to use them.

Hi DesuDeus, I do want to try some stuff for environment maps in the future, I'm hoping to get some initial stuff for that in v3.

As with many things, there is more than just coding the raw function, there is also a lot of things to consider about UI design, etc....

So it is often not the case that just crunching out some code to do something automatically makes it the same as a finished feature, many times the other details of the UI design and workflow take more effort than the "back end" work actually.

- Michael

For everyone that doesn't know what's env maps here's an exemple http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh8a7vymAAg
Its a spherical image, that act as a fake environnement for the objects. It helps communicating with the client, or more importantly, help
modelling surfaces by giving a clear visual feedback. It can also be used as a lighthing method. Its been used for a long time in video games.
And now it start to be used in 3d software, like Autodesk Alias Design or Rhino.

@Michael
Yeah env maps are a big piece of the puzzle.
Using the "edit style" window to assign env maps would be cool :)
Instead of expanding the UI of MoI. Maybe also have a visual indicator of the current env map
assigned in the attribut editor where you have the object name / style and dimensions.

Maybe before coding all this, having the code but not the UI part and using scripts?
I cant really tell if the MoI UI is big or not im on two 24 inch screens at work :P

I use environment maps 99% of the time in Rhino. It would be really nice to see them more prevalent in MoI. If it were me, I would have the color picker be an environment map picker instead, but I completely understand the video card memory concerns. A 512x512x24 map is what, 6mb uncompressed? Not sure how small that would be as a dxtc texture or whatever direct3d uses these days. It just seems like an easy/straightforward way to optionally utilize more of the video card for (what I humbly assume to be) the majority of people using modern hardware.

In any case, it seems like you're generating one global environment map via your light definitions. Would it be possible to load this precalculated map from disk, so that we could simply replace it with our own until you have time to flesh out the style system and UI a bit more?