Improve Hidden Line Rendering.

[christian]

Smoothing angle

I have experimented with the smoothing angle and however I set it, either I end up with too many lines defining a curve or I begin to loose the outline.

Component Intersections

Where one component is inserted into another, i.e. the rails going into a chair leg. Hidden Line Rendering will often not show a line at the point of intersection.

Groups

Hidden Line Rendering does not appear to work on grouped objects. Everything has to be ungrouped and as a result the file grows enormously, doubling in size and more. Making a file of even a single piece of furniture very unwieldy.

At the moment the only way to achieve reasonable results on curved models is to set the smoothing angle to a slightly smaller angle than necessary, then ungroup everything, then convert to lines, then ungroup again, and finally manually delete the lines you don?t want and insert those that Hidden Line Rendering hasn?t managed.

[Andrew Bell@NV]

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Originally posted by christian:

Smoothing angle

I have experimented with the smoothing angle and however I set it, either I end up with too many lines defining a curve or I begin to loose the outline.

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This could definitely be improved, and is a known wishlist item. I'm not authorized to tell you when you might get a fix.

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Component Intersections

Where one component is inserted into another, i.e. the rails going into a chair leg. Hidden Line Rendering will often not show a line at the point of intersection.

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This is incorrect. The hidden line code never computes an intersection line; it only works with the edges actually present in the drawing. At present if you want this behavior, you should do a solid addition on the chair components, or subtract a copy of one component from the other, to get the intersection lines you want.

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Groups

Hidden Line Rendering does not appear to work on grouped objects. Everything has to be ungrouped and as a result the file grows enormously, doubling in size and more.

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At present, the defaceting code assumes you want to treat everything in a group as facets of a surface, and thus to have facet lines removed just like within a mesh. You can avoid this by ungrouping, although I can see how this is inconvenient; I'll consider adding a preference for how groups are to be handled. An ungrouped collection of objects is actually smaller than the grouped equivalent. Are you talking about symbols, instead?