Looks great.

I think shadows would just get in the way, unless there was an option to turn them off.

Ed

HI Michael nice one i can't wait for color glass and reflection
here is miror reflection in moi
how to : miror the object and place PNG picture on Z plane for cliping (with object, all view,0 transparency) i have attached the picture.

Hi Michael
Good sounds for my ......
al

Yes! YES! I love it.

Good work as usual, Michael.

SUPER...

Michael,

How did you resolve the black and white surface ? Will the black have dark gray wireframe ? And how about the white surface ? (white wireframe will be more less invisible).
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 ?

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 ?
Did you made some test with only black wireframe ? As there is some kind of soft specular on the surface, even a black surface + black wireframe will still be 'readable' I guess.

Sorry for all the questions, I can't wait to play with the color feature :)

Hi Pilou,

> And seems that now volumes have working colors ;)

Yup, that's one of the other parts that I've been working on.


> No shadows?

No, shadows tend to be a more generally finicky area, it's easy to have a lot of problems across various video cards, etc...

I think it will be a while before I would be able to work on that, it's definitely not going to be part of this current pass.

- Michael

hi michael,

good to see a new lighting model, this will be a good addition.

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 can imagine that sometimes too much color can get in the way. I could imagine I may want to turn the colour on sometimes only to check which styles are assigned to which objects.
Thanks,

Possibility of level of transparency by object?
See something behind or inside can be useful for snap something for example!!! (Xray mode) ;)
(sure you can rotate or make tricky selection but...

Hi Danny,

> 3 Lights ?

Actually at the moment it is the equivalent of 8 lights, basically in 4 matched pairs.

I'm going to see about taking a couple of those and dicing them up into maybe 20 much lower intensity lights to try and blend one area together a bit more.

But with this new method all of this happens in a precalculating step, so there is no performance penalty at display time no matter how many lights go into the calculation which gives me a lot more flexibility to tweak things.

- Michael

20 Lights! Wow!
Like setting up a Broadway show :)

On another note, I have the same questions as PaQ. 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.

Cheers
~Danny~

Hi jonah,

> Only problem i see is that the lighting seems to give an
> illusion of surface warp. Notice the spheres don't really
> look spherical?

Well, they look like spheres that have a bunch of lights shining on them...

The part that is probably different from what you are used to is a kind of "polar opposite" lighting method. That's where for every light there is an opposite one shining on the reverse side of the sphere.

That's instead of a light only just shining in one direction and illuminating one half of the sphere and leaving the other half completely dark.

With the polar opposite lighting, the darkness is more of a thinner equatorial kind of band rather than being a large area of darkness. That band does give it a kind of semi-iridescent type look, but that actually helps to perceive more details about the surface shape actually, because when a large area is dark it is difficult to get visual feedback about the curvature there.

So there's really plenty of visual information there that makes it possible to understand that is a sphere, at least for me anyway! I guess if you have a very ingrained idea that a sphere must have only a certain kind of light applied to it then it might seem odd though.

- Michael

Hi DesuDeus,

> Michael what tech do you use for display in MoI? Directx?

Yes, currently it uses Direct3D for outputting polygons to your video card.

But most of the look comes from custom code in MoI that sets up stuff like polygons and textures. Direct3D is for the most part just used to blast those processed polygons to be displayed on the screen.

- Michael

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