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?

And that, Michael, is one of the reasons why MOI is such a treat. Many software packages (especially Open Source) just add the functionality with the UI thrown together at the last second. When a feature comes to MOI, we can be assured that it also be easy to use.

Hi DesuDeus,

> Maybe before coding all this, having the code but not the
> UI part and using scripts?

Sometimes that can work, but not always.

Often times what is exposed to script is guided by what the UI needs to have available to it.

So it often helps to have a good script interface by also having a good UI design thought out at the same time that will make use of it.

It's also harder to do things like actually test the script interface without having a UI set up to exercise it.

- Michael

Hi vodkamartini,

> 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?

Not very easily - the image in this case is not just a simple bitmap but a cube map that has 6 different image planes associated with it.

So that needs to have some kind of special tools set up to read and write it, it would take too much extra work right now to try and find or create those tools and also test them.

- Michael

No problem, Michael.

BTW, there are tons of programs out in the wild that handle that sorta thing from the end-user perspective (e.g. http://www.outerspace-software.com/bixorama.html). The last time I played with cubemaps was years ago, but I remember there were free utilities included in the directx sdk and I believe nvidia had some as well. Anyways, thanks for the consideration.

It's not well known, but Rhino 4 already has an excellent utility for converting image maps from one projection to another. For example, inputting a sphere map and outputting a horizontal or vertical cross map :

1. install the RDK plugin from the Labs wiki page
2. in the RDK's Texture Pallete, create a new "Projection Texture Changer"
3. assign your sphere map to the bitmap input
4. set the input projection to "lightprobe"
5. set the output projection to your choice of output (rectangular, h-cross, v-cross, etc)
6. Save as Image

Might be a handy tool for Rhino/MoI users, once MoI uses reflection maps...

jonah

Oh I didn't knew that Rhino could do it :)
Cinema 4d can also convert cross and spherical I think.

DesuDeus wrote "...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..."

I think there is a misconception of what Auxpecker is. It's really just a browser that hooks up to Rhino's object material properties. It doesn't actually add display functions to Rhino. But Auxpecker made it much easier for many people to get up and running with using reflection maps. From what I know, they were all rendered in Maxwell... Also there is a new UI browser called Blackbird RT which is under development by an Italian user. This one will have a price tag, though. Combined with V5's real-time shadows, reflection maps can make some pretty convincing results... But essentially is the same as Auxpecker (which as you mentioned is free!)... Personally i accomplish the same results with a single macro on a toolbar button. Which incidentally was also free... :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNGqvLqED5s&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jewelslab.com%2Findex.php%2Fe-jewels%2Fblackbird&feature=player_embedded

jonah