Depending of the angle, I see seam lines that should be normally invisible.
When I zoom, for example, these lines disappear.
Is this caused by my video card?
If not, how can I prevent seeing these seam lines.
Thanks,
Gaston

Hi Gaston, that's a display artifact that just happens normally, it's not dependent on your video card, it happens because the display engine pulls curves towards your eye point when they are drawn so that edges and curves on surfaces do not end up partially submerged or "stippled".

But as a side effect of making things not accidentally hidden when they should be displayed it can sometimes cause the reverse effect of something being visible when it should be hidden.

In the future I have some ideas to work on to try and minimize that but for now it's just a normal display artifact that should be ignored.

See here for some more information:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4987.2

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4061.6


In general the display engine has a focus on doing things quickly rather than trying to make an absolutely perfect looking image that would take a long time to display, so it's not unusual for there to be some various glitches and artifacts like this in the real-time viewport display.

If you want to get a better looking image, you would want to use a rendering program to do that which in its rendering process will be able to do a much more detailed and also more time consuming approach rather than the "focused on doing things quickly and within the constraints of how video cards work" that the MoI display engine is targeting.

- Michael

Michael, I have a neat idea you could add to your list if you like:

If, when processing the curve-ends and poly's through the video card - you could perhaps take the portion of the line that is visible through the surface with the one that is submerged and make the difference a little portion that is grayed out.
Or, maybe the line end doesn't know when it's not supposed to be there... eh.

That way, whether it is there or not, it is most likely going to be more intuitive to understand when looking at it.

Hi Mike - the way things work is mostly that MoI just pushes a whole lot of polygons over to the video card and then it is the video card's job to display it and it's the thing that actually handles visibility determination.

It's not easy to do things conditionally depending on that information - it is possible to a certain extent to do that by utilizing programmable shaders, but trying to make elaborate shaders can be bad for performance itself and also once I start to go down that path it would make MoI only run on relatively newer video cards and not everywhere like it currently does.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,
That seem to be a well documented problem but I failed to find the proper terminology to find references to it.

<If you want to get a better looking image, you would want to use a rendering program to do that which in its rendering process will be able to do a much more detailed and also more time consuming approach rather than the "focused on doing things quickly and within the constraints of how video cards work" that the MoI display engine is targeting.>

Could you suggest a low cost rendering program with a "smoother" learning curve than Blender?
Gaston

Hi Gaston - re: rendering programs - either SimLab Composer (http://www.simlab-soft.com/) or Carrara (http://www.daz3d.com/shop/carrara-8) would probably be good candidates for you, I think they each have demo versions that you could try.

To either of those programs you would want to export out from MoI using OBJ format and at export time set: "Export: Quads & Triangles" rather than "Export: n-gons" since those programs may not like to deal with complex n-gon polygons.

- Michael

I will have a look.
Thanks Michael,
Gaston

Bryce and Daz studio are free at the moment....

http://www.daz3d.com/shop/