Hi Michael,

When working on an assembly I like to hide faces and leave edges showing to check interaction between parts while modeling, I noticed when only edges are showing that the pre-highlight isn't activated, do you think when in wireframe that we could still have pre-highlighting when over one of the edges?

~Danny~

Hi Danny, the problem is that when you have a solid, the pre-highlighting of a solid is drawn by colorizing the faces of the solid.

So if you have hidden all the faces, you have hidden the part that actually shows the highlight.

Early on in MoI, I tried putting the "halo glow" that is used for pre-highlight of curve selection on all the edges of a highlighted solid. That looked pretty weird though.

One other difficulty is that it is possible to have only some faces hidden, so an object can be in a kind of "partial wireframe" with only some faces hidden.

Maybe the kind of thing that you are talking about where the actual behavior of the drawing is different would require more of a full "wireframe mode" that you would switch on or off instead of the current system where that is kind of simulated just by hiding faces.

I'm not entirely sure about that though, because the current system also has some benefits of making it possible to have just some objects or even portions of objects displayed in "wireframe" instead of it being an all or nothing type thing.

Maybe I should treat the case where all faces are hidden as special and only in that case draw the highlight as the halo around all edge curves.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> Maybe I should treat the case where all faces
> are hidden as special and only in that case
> draw the highlight as the halo around all edge curves.

That sounds good, is that per solid, joined surface or single surface, like if I have two soilds and one of them is in wireframe I'd like the wire frame of that solid to pre-highlight or are you saying that the whole scene has to be in wireframe?

-

Hi Danny, I guess it would be at a per-brep level.

> like if I have two soilds and one of them is in wireframe
> I'd like the wire frame of that solid to pre-highlight

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

One possible problem with this is that it can make it look as if that solid is actually a curve object since it will get the same behavior as curves in that case.

But when seeing it happen to all the edges, that would probably make it look distinct enough.

I guess the combination that I would target for that to kick in would be all edges visible but all faces hidden on a brep.

- Michael

Hi Danny, so I just tried this, and it kind of just pushes some odd behavior to when you actually do the click to select things.

When you click to actually select the object, the wireframe does not show the selection, for the same kind of reasons that it did not show the pre-selection highlight (since it is currently designed to show it by colorizing faces).

Then I think if I try to do a similar thing and make edges show as selected when a "wireframe" solid is selected, then that pushes some problems on to the edge selection drill down stage since then there will be a bunch of edges that are displaying as selected when they really are not selected (as edges).


It should be possible to get this all working in a cohesive manner, but it will involve making a plan for the whole selection system, including what happens when you click, and how sub-object drill in works in this different state. So it's a lot more involved than just changing the pre-selection highlight stuff.

I can probably take a stab at making this work better in v3.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> Then I think if I try to do a similar thing and make
> edges show as selected when a "wireframe" solid
> is selected, then that pushes some problems on
> to the edge selection drill down stage since then
> there will be a bunch of edges that are displaying
> as selected when they really are not selected (as edges).

How about a different color for the halo and highlight for breps when edge only?

> I can probably take a stab at making this work better in v3.

That'll be great, I'm confident that you will make this work smooth and logical.


One other thing I noticed is when one brep is edge only and the other has faces during a Boolean operation you end up in a mixed state, which I believe could be misleading.

Example:

We start off with two solid blocks, one with edges only the other faces and edges.


When we do a Boolean Union we get this.


Boolean Diff


without looking at the object properties panel one would think that it produced a joined surface with missing faces, do you think after a Boolean operation that all faces should be showing for the new brep ?

-

Hi Danny,

> How about a different color for the halo and
> highlight for breps when edge only?

I generally try to avoid using too many different colors for different things.

Often times I think it just leads to people wondering, "why is this stuff some weird other color" instead it actually conveying an easy to understand message.

Also using more colors makes things more likely to conflict with other colors that people want to use for their regular display, for organization or whatever.


> do you think after a Boolean operation that all faces should
> be showing for the new brep ?

Hmm, how about if it will follow the same wireframe state as the first selected object? That will make it consistent with other things as well, like the parent object name for example (if you have 2 different named objects and you boolean them, the new combined object gets the name from the object that was selected first).

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> I generally try to avoid using too many different colors for different things.

It was just something that immediately popped into my head and I just threw it out there :)

> Hmm, how about if it will follow the same wireframe state as the first selected object?

Yes, that'll do the trick, thanks!

Cheers

Hi Danny,

> It was just something that immediately popped into my
> head and I just threw it out there :)

Believe me, I wish I could do that... :) It tends to be a lot harder to try and make everything fit in a more limited set of colors. (or in limited space, limited whatever is more difficult).


> Yes, that'll do the trick, thanks!

Great, I've added that in for the next beta.


The other thing I just added is that if all the original faces of an object are hidden (so the object is in kind of "wireframe mode"), then any new faces like fillets will also get hidden so that the whole object stays as wireframe. Previously just the fillet faces would be showing with the rest of the stuff still in wireframe.

- Michael

Would a 5 or 10 percent opaque ruin the intent if hidden faces. So a face is hidden and you can turn on a "mouseover" opacity for hidden faces?

Hi Burr, some faint opacity for "hidden" faces could work.

But my display engine does not currently have translucent faces set up to work in it yet. That's something that I am hoping to add in the future.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

> It tends to be a lot harder to try and make
> everything fit in a more limited set of colors.
> (or in limited space, limited whatever is more difficult).

Yes, we experience that here at work with every project, it's like the customer always wants a circus to happen on a 1ftX1ft area, and when we achieve it they come back and ask if they can squeeze in one more Elephant :)
So we know how you feel.

> The other thing I just added........

That's great! it keeps it consistent across the board.

-

I thought about the transparency not being there yet, but what about "Glow"? Can something still glow if it is hidden? is the Glow some kind of directx shading thing that is a bit of light being emitted or is Glow just an illusion to my eye with the visible surfaces color change.....So omit all glowing shades from hide routine.

Hi Burr,

> Would a 5 or 10 percent opaque ruin the intent
> if hidden faces. So a face is hidden and you can
> turn on a "mouseover" opacity for hidden faces?

I like this idea, but the reason I like edges only is so that I can work through solids on an underlying piece for alignment of features, so having any faces would obstruct. I would like transparency though :) and I can also wait for it.

Cheers

Yeah I hear you there. I was trying to input on the ability to differentiate between a wireframe and a solid with the faces hidden and how to know to drill down to select those edges. I had heard Michael mention before that he will be adding in these other types of rendering options like transparency (I cant wait), but I always have to chime in. Hoping to get lucky and contribute! I think I have a couple good contributions (if not only one) over the time I've spent here. Just have to throttle myself so I'm not a pester instead of an asset. :O

Hi Burr - re: Glow - the glow effect is something that works along a 2D path, it only applies to curve rendering, not face rendering. So unfortunately it would not help for this particular purpose.

- Michael

That's cool Burr, I like thread input from other users on the forum it makes more interesting reading, some of the ideas are great and it's better to say it than think it.
Plus we can't allow Michael to get bored :)

Cheers

Sending good vibes out to his little guy! ♥