Hi Michael, I run into these issues pretty often, and it occurred to me that a really useful feature would be visual feedback indicating the problematic edges. A status/error pane/bar would also be really nice, since stuff seems to fail silently-- additionally, since some actions automatically complete without hitting done, silently failing can be a bit bewildering.

Will

Hi Will, the problem is that it tends to be quite difficult to provide error information that makes any sense to a regular human being as opposed to a mathematician...

It also requires some cooperation from the inner functions of the geometry kernel itself to return back the specific information about what particular edges caused the problem, right now this is not really provided for in an extensive way by the geometry library that MoI uses.


> additionally, since some actions automatically complete without hitting done,
> silently failing can be a bit bewildering.

Do you have an example of one of these situations? It always helps to have a specific example to look at rather than just talking in general terms.

There are many commands that don't have any further options to adjust in them, those generally finish without needing to do a separate additional "Done" stage in order to increase efficiency of operation.


At some point I would like to have a kind of console area where a log of information could be displayed. I have not yet found a good place to put that in the UI without it consuming a lot of space and kind of dominating the UI to a problematic extent though.

- Michael

Hi Michael, I suggested the visual feedback (perhaps highlighting problematic edges in red) to avoid complicated error messages, though if an command fails, it would be nice for the command pane (top left corner) to at least display "command failed" or "union failed" or some such instead of just disappearing.

As far as commands which sometimes do not require pressing "done" go, most recently I ran into a bit of frustration unioning complex solids which I had preselected. I eventually reworked the solids, but the bewildering bit is this: the union takes a long time, and the "done" button still responds to clicks, but does not appear to do anything-- then the command pane disappears and I assumed the union had succeeded. I only discovered that it hadn't after trying to do another boolean operation where one of the failed union pieces was hidden from view. I retried the union a few times before I realized it was not operator error in applying the union, but that my model was broken in some way.

Will

Hi Will,

> though if an command fails, it would be nice for the command pane (top left corner) to at least display
> "command failed" or "union failed" or some such instead of just disappearing.

That's already been added in for the most recent v3 beta. From the release notes:



> As far as commands which sometimes do not require pressing "done" go, most recently I ran into a
> bit of frustration unioning complex solids which I had preselected.

Yeah that happens because it's also possible for Union to work with nothing initially selected in which case it asks you to select things and waits for you to push "Done". That same UI is ending up displaying for the preselection case as well. I guess that could be tuned up by hiding the "Done" button for the case of stuff having been already preselected before running the command.

The new "Calculation failed" UI should be helpful for distinguishing cases where there was not any result generated, although with boolean union there is another complication with failures in that it's not quite the case that nothing is generated from the union but that the same objects are generated out the other end but they did not cut each other up.

- Michael

Ah, I didn't realize the new beta added that. Excellent!

I know the preselection causes automatic command execution for some commands, which is great. It was just baffling when the command pane appeared and suddenly vanished without completion for no apparent reason. Anyway, the new UI you mentioned should help with that.

As a suggestion for the done button, perhaps when the command starts execution, change the text to "Calculating..." and disable the button so it doesn't respond to clicks.

Edit: Actually, an approach more consistent with typical UI would be to immediately change the entire content of the pane to a progress view. Even if a progress bar or percentage is not doable and it just displays "Calculating..." and a cancel button, the content switch makes sense. Usually one expects clicking done or cancel to immediately close the pane or transition to a new content view. Just my $0.02.

Will

Hi Will,

> Edit: Actually, an approach more consistent with typical UI would be to immediately change
> the entire content of the pane to a progress view.

Sounds pretty good, but one complication is that there are also many commands that need to show some kind of an "in progress" indicator (like "Calculating..." does currently) while you're still inside the command, for commands that have options that you can adjust before finishing the command. Like for example the Fillet command lets you enter in a radius and then starts off the calculation, but when the calculation is finished you're still in the fillet command and can change the radius again (and get "Calculating..." again) before you actually finish the command.

That's why the current "Calculating..." mechanism is more like something that gets added in to whatever UI is currently showing rather than only being a final screen.

- Michael