Hidden Line Render Bug Maybe?

[Bruce Kieffer]

When I set the smoothing angle in the line render options to anything other than 0.00 degrees, my 3D polygons do not render. This is not good. There are lines in my solid subtractions that I want to hide in the rendering. Does anyone else see this problem? Any solution you can suggest?

[DDDesign]

I haven't noticed this particular problem, but the HLR is full of bugs. I hardly ever get the correct result - lines missing or appearing where they shouldn't be.

My solution for removing unwanted lines in a viewport HLR is, in the annotations mode, draw a white, thick line over the offending line. Zooming way up can help this process. For curves, the method is not so good - draw an object(s) with a white fill and stroke over the area.

Sometime I play around with using artistic renderworks- tapered lines mode - setting taper, cutrliness and wobbliness to zero. But this only occaisionally gives a satisfactory result.

The best method would be to have VW fix the thing so HLR works properly!

[Bruce Kieffer]

OK... I spoke with the tech support folks and I have a bit more info about this problem. 3D polygons will render hidden line with a smoothing angle set greater than 0.00? if they are not grouped with something else. I don't understand the explanation why, but they say it's something to do with the 3D line having only 2 points. I tested with other 3D lines made as NURBS and mesh, same results. I can't see a good reason why this behavior would be useful. I think this is a bug that should be fixed. Tech support's work around is either to use small extruded circles to imitate lines in grouped objects, or to ungroup the objects prior to hidden line rendering. My work around will be to create 3 point lines using the polygon tool and convert them to 3D polygons that I will add to groups.

Edited August 18, 2007 by Bruce Kieffer