Hi Michael,

I'm doing some style/color editing for the moment, and I think editing styles taking a lot of mouse clicking.
Clicking on the little arrow, click edit style, clicking on the style you wand to edit, click on edit and finally choosing the color.

Maybe it would be nice to speedup it a little bit ? like [right click] on the style name to open the edit style tab ?

Edit - Sorry for the thread misspelling

Btw the new shading mode is super cool, I'll kill to have this quality in my render engine =)

As always, PaQ, your work is HOTT!

-Will

Astonished rendering in Moi!

MoI Phong!

>> I'm doing some style/color editing for the moment, and I think editing styles taking a lot of mouse clicking.
>> Clicking on the little arrow, click edit style, clicking on the style you wand to edit, click on edit and finally
>> choosing the color.

I like the styles, but I have to agree with PaQ. Getting to the style seems very un-MoI like at the moment.

The current edit styles dialog seems more like manage styles to me. I would appreciate a quicker way to get to the style colour picker. Not so bothered about the name though.

Sounds more like if you want to use the style as a "Visual rendering" device as opposed to management stuff. Usually the creation of a new style would want to take care in naming and such so they can be used like layers. But if just changing colors to find a look in the viewport, this makes sense. But remember at some point, rendering is coming in! So UI design to cover something that comes later may be out????

Burr

Hello guys, Hi BurrMan,

Well actually styles are translated into surface in rendering package like modo, lw, etc. So yes to me it's actually surface editor.
I understand it will be a little bit more in the future, like storing some visual presets, with custom edge lines, reflection etc.
But even if it's 'just' a management stuff, it's actually not fast enough for editing.

Actually you can rename an object just by right or left click on his name, while changing the name or color from a style require 4 mouse clicks for the name, 5 for the colors.
I don't see why you can't just right click on the style from the scene browser to direclty open the edit style tab from the selected style.
It's possible that there are some reasons for it too, I often don't think far enough to see all the problems it will bring on the table, and usually everything is wisely done in MoI :)

Do you really think MoI will have a internal render engine some day ? Personnaly the viewport is nice enough for me ... and ... there are allready some many render engine around, a connection to them will be probably better ... but that's an other topic :)

OIC. I wasnt thinking of the use of it as you mention...For surface description in the export!

Michael has mentioned that in the future he would like to have a render type addition. This would be when becoming a more mature, full spectrum package. As you mention, other CAD systems usually incorporate some other Render engine like Rhino+Hypershot. But Maybe Michael will make some new product that is superior somehow! :O

Hi Tony & PaQ,

I'm not really sure of how "workflows", "pipelines" & all that kind of stuff works, but I do know it's important for the stuff you guys do.
So I'm just wondering if for now you might be better off creating yourselves a few different MoI Templates with some of your preferred Styles already in them?

That way at least you've minimised the amount of extra work in creating them from scratch?
Anyway, it was just a thought.

Ohh, that's a great looking model & MoI Styles-render you did PaQ.

regards Colin

Being used to cad software that needs several clicks to get to a dialog you want, I didn't really notice, now that it's been mentioned I've always set up icons in the other cad apps for the dialogs I use often, but they're set up to create icons for what ever function you want, very easily, I know MoI will be able to do this one day :)
So Maybe a couple of small icons, one for edit, one for add in place of the arrow would do the trick.

One other thing that I found weird while playing around with styles is if I double right click a style colour, Internet Explorer launches.

And PaQ, nice job on using Moi's styles for visual presentation on that model, it really looks great!

Cheers

Hi Danny, quick note on this part:

> One other thing that I found weird while playing around
> with styles is if I double right click a style colour, Internet
> Explorer launches.

You probably have an nVidia video card on this machine?

There is some kind of utility that comes with nVidia cards that likes to hook into programs and launch Internet Explorer like that.

You might check to see if there is a program called "nwiz.exe" or "nVidia Desktop Utility" that is running on startup, and if so try disabling it and see if that removes this problem.

Some more info here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2570.16

- Michael

Hi PaQ,

> Clicking on the little arrow, click edit style, clicking on
> the style you wand to edit, click on edit and finally choosing
> the color.

One note on this part - instead of a click on the little arrow and then another click on "Edit styles" in the flyout you can actually do it more like one motion:

Press down on the little arrow and keep the mouse button down, drag over to "Edit styles" and release on it.


> Maybe it would be nice to speedup it a little bit ? like
> [right click] on the style name to open the edit style tab ?

Yup, that one is easy to set up, I've added it for the next beta.

And actually you can update your current beta to work like that as well, copy the attached file EditStylesDialog.htm over top of the previous version in the \ui subfolder inside of the v2 beta's main installation folder and it should behave like that. Let me know if that was not what you meant.

- Michael

Hi PaQ,

> Btw the new shading mode is super cool, I'll kill to have
> this quality in my render engine =)

I'm glad you like it! :)

Could you please show what your lighting options are for that screenshot? I've been thinking some about setting a low level of specular as the initial default.

The new lighting engine is based off of some prototype/research work I did about 6 years ago very early in the development of MoI. I just did not have a chance to actually implement it until now.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
> You probably have an nVidia video card on this machine?

Yup, nvidia nview utility was the culprit.

Cheers

Hi Tony,

> I would appreciate a quicker way to get to the style
> colour picker. Not so bothered about the name though.

What about a Ctrl+click on a style's color swatch in the Scene Browser, would that handle this ok?

- Michael

Hi PaQ,

> I don't see why you can't just right click on the style
> from the scene browser to direclty open the edit style tab
> from the selected style.

A plain right-click is already used for a variety of other things.

Like a right-click on a style's swatch will set that style as the "active style", which is the one that is applied to newly drawn objects. There's a ring around the outside of the active style's swatch and you should see that ring move when you right-click on different swatches.

Right-click on the style's name sets all the objects of that style as the isolated selection (with everything else de-selected).

But Ctrl+Click on a swatch is not currently used for anything, so that could be a possibility.


> Do you really think MoI will have a internal render engine
> some day ?

Most likely yes, but it will probably be pretty basic for just getting quick simple results.


> there are allready some many render engine around, a connection
> to them will be probably better ...

Yes, actually having a basic built-in renderer at some point will not really be a replacement for this kind of a thing unless you only need pretty basic results.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>> One note on this part - instead of a click on the little arrow and then another click on "Edit styles" in the flyout you can actually do it more like one motion:
Press down on the little arrow and keep the mouse button down, drag over to "Edit styles" and release on it.

Allright that's a allready one click less :)

>>Yup, that one is easy to set up, I've added it for the next beta.

And actually you can update your current beta to work like that as well, copy the attached file EditStylesDialog.htm over top of the previous version in the \ui subfolder inside of the v2 beta's main installation folder and it should behave like that. Let me know if that was not what you meant

Cool, that's a other one ... thank you very much !
(I was more looking for this behaviour for the scene browser style windows, but I didn't get that right click on a style isolate the selection like you explain later)

and ... what about right click on the style name from the here ?


>> But Ctrl+Click on a swatch is not currently used for anything, so that could be a possibility.

Well, I don't like to much mutli key combo like that, it probably not really in the MoI spirit :)

>> Could you please show what your lighting options are for that screenshot? I've been thinking some about setting a low level of specular as the initial default.



I probably will not use it at a modeling stage, a little to much disturbing I guess.
But I like it for buffer render shot, I've rerender the robot too with that settings -> http://users.skynet.be/fc508872/WIP.html

Thanks for taking some of your time sir !

>>Hi Tony,

>>> I would appreciate a quicker way to get to the style
>>> colour picker. Not so bothered about the name though.

>>What about a Ctrl+click on a style's color swatch in the Scene Browser, would that handle this ok?

Sounds like this would be perfect. Thanks Michael.


Hi Paq:

>>Well, I don't like to much mutli key combo like that, it probably not really in the MoI spirit

There's already a number of these in MoI. Plus more may have to come as Michael adds functionality. Personally I like them. The CNTRL, ALT and SHIFT keys means one action can do at least 3 things. Combining them to have CNTRL+ALT mean even more, without having to mouse around the interface a lot. Keeps the UI a bit cleaner and it can be very fast once you learn.

One of my favourites is holding down control and dragging to get a copy of an object :-)

Hi PaQ,

> and ... what about right click on the style name from the here ?

Hmmm, yup that would be another good candidate for some kind of shortcut.

I guess it could either pop up the "Edit styles" dialog (the one with the list of all styles on it with Add/Delete/Edit/Up/Down), or the "Edit style" dialog for editing the properties (currently name and color) of just that one style.

Any idea which one would make more sense?


> > But Ctrl+Click on a swatch is not currently used for anything,
> > so that could be a possibility.

> Well, I don't like to much mutli key combo like that, it
> probably not really in the MoI spirit :)

I don't really want to rely on them for the basic essential functions, but they can be good for shortcuts and advanced type functions.

The only problem is that I just remembered that I was going to also use that Ctrl+click as a way to set the style on the parent brep object without changing any sub-objects... I guess I could do something like shift for that instead though.


re: specular - I think I may go for even slightly less brightness than that for the initial default setting, so there is just a hint of it.


> I've rerender the robot too with that settings ->
> http://users.skynet.be/fc508872/WIP.html

Wow, your robot is looking really awesome there with the new lighting and shading system!

It does look a lot like a rendering instead of a real time display which is pretty cool! :) I guess kind of more like a semi-toon or technical illustration type rendering though since there are no shadows. But possibly when I do get a chance to do some basic built in renderer work it may be more focused on that kind of a style initially rather than a photoreal type orientation.

- Michael