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Hidden Line Rendering 20 min vs 3 Seconds


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16 hours ago, digitalcarbon said:

 

i don't see it anywhere 

 

 

59fe3dfb58a50_ScreenShot2017-11-04at6_22_38PM.png.3f64de3834ae18219c7996d93f6a2d63.png

 

 

Yes, no matter what Render Mode you set for your VPs.

When you enter "Edit in Place" and change the View orientation, like to an Isometric,

you will be automatically in a new fast HL Mode.

And if I got @Chih-Pin right, it is currently only available in this direct editing mode

and nowhere else.

 

I would like to see that Mode for Design Layers too.

Edited by zoomer
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So if I understand it right, the fast HL Mode is  of no use at all, since it can not be used in SLVP ?

 

I prefer Hidden Line for SLVP, since Open GL sometiomes looks a bit like "Lego" or "Playmobil"  toys, especialliy when using bright colors. So it's almost once a day that I bite into my desktop waiting half an hour or more because I accidentlty tried to render a too detailed VP. Thats why I'm always complaining here about missing the CANCEL UPDATE button for Hidden Line rendering.

A quicker Hidden Line mode ( to the costs off less accuracy ) would be a real milestone for my workflow.

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I see your need for a faster HL Mode,

so a "Feature" wish.

 

If I get that correct,

- today very few people or tasks really need the VW current HL System's special Feature,

which can produce real geometry, which allows to ungroup and edit later (?)

- The new fast GPU HL's quality would be sufficient for plan dawings (?)

 

So the new HL mode should be added and be available for DL views and Viewports also.

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14 minutes ago, zoomer said:

I see your need for a faster HL Mode,

so a "Feature" wish.

 

If I get that correct,

- today very few people or tasks really need the VW current HL System's special Feature,

which can produce real geometry, which allows to ungroup and edit later (?)

- The new fast GPU HL's quality would be sufficient for plan dawings (?)

 

So the new HL mode should be added and be available for DL views and Viewports also.

 

Yes, that's exactly the point!

 

And many thanks to digitalcarbon for the video! This exactly describes my daily pain with VW Hidden Line rendering !

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31 minutes ago, halfcouple said:

 

Yes, that's exactly the point!

 

And many thanks to digitalcarbon for the video! This exactly describes my daily pain with VW Hidden Line rendering !

 

Yes. All I need is what OpenGL does with "show edges", but actually showing all of the edges (or better yet, based on angle)  and no shading. That alone would fix everything I've been looking for. 

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4 hours ago, zoomer said:

And if I got @Chih-Pin right, it is currently only available in this direct editing mode

and nowhere else.

This is basically correct, except you will also see similar trick when you are flying over the views in design layer HL render mode. Without this trick, it can't achieve real-time interactive HL rendering. But after you finish flying over, it will try to calculate the full and standard HL render mode.

 

3 hours ago, halfcouple said:

Thats why I'm always complaining here about missing the CANCEL UPDATE button for Hidden Line rendering.

 

3 hours ago, halfcouple said:

A quicker Hidden Line mode ( to the costs off less accuracy ) would be a real milestone for my workflow.

I personally agree with these two suggestions. In many cases, the fast HL rendering is good enough, and it's much faster. However, I also see some improvements needed for fast HL rendering. I also suffered the unnecessarily long time HL rendering in my own personal projects. I will create a VE(s) and raise the discussions internally. Hopefully, we can have these features in VW.

 

Edited by Chih-Pin
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Just now, halfcouple said:

 

That sounds great! Can we have this for christmas ?   :)

 

images.jpg

 

Sorry to disappoint you on this. But based on what I, as a software engineer, suffered when adding new features and fixing bugs in this complex system, I believe it's not possible to be that fast. 

 

 

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14 minutes ago, Chih-Pin said:

you will also see similar trick when you are flying over the views in design layer HL render mode.

 

Is this a trick ?

I would say a valid behavior. I am used these OpenGL(?) realtime Hiddenline Modes for Viewpanes everywhere

for decades. You can find that in C4D too.

 

I am not so 2D so I don't know which features are still missing in your fast Mode. Different Line Weights or Colors

and such things (?). Or if there are still many people outside that rely on such linework output.

But as far as I understood, the standard HL also may have some potential for speed improvements and may have

still its legitimation.

 

I personally would be fine with your new speed HL Mode in Viewpanes AND Viewports :)

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15 minutes ago, zoomer said:

I am not so 2D so I don't know which features are still missing in your fast Mode. Different Line Weights or Colors

and such things (?). Or if there are still many people outside that rely on such linework output.

But as far as I understood, the standard HL also may have some potential for speed improvements and may have

still its legitimation.

For instance, this is a fast HL mode on a cylinder - 

fastHL.PNG.5f295b5f3707659e856f4cbdc131797e.PNG

 

This is a standard HL rendering --

HL.PNG.5f8a4ceceb10f9f427e756321b18b38d.PNG

 

As you can see, the edges on both ends of the cylinder are missing in the fast HL rendering. There are also other similar cases to this.

In my opinion, we need to at least make fast HL look the same (or at least similar) in these cases before we can make it as one of the render modes. 

Edited by Chih-Pin
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Ok, christmas was a little joke. I'm happy with small improvements, so it's great to know that the problem is notified and will somehow be processed.

 

@zoomer :

I generally do everything in 3D and I would love to get rid of all this 2D conversion, but when it comes to practically explain details, a 2D paper sheet (or PDF) ist still the "lowest common denominator of technical communication".

 

@Chih-Pin:

Yes, of course the standard HL looks better, but as a first step it would be great to have the fast HL Modus as option available. It's absolutely ok for daily fast work. If I want better quality I can still switch to standart HL.

Edited by halfcouple
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4 minutes ago, halfcouple said:

Yes, of course the standard HL looks better, but as a first step it would be great to have the fast HL Modus as option available. It's absolutely ok for daily fast work. If I want better quality I can still switch ti standart HL.

5

Suggestion heard, I will raise discussions with my colleagues and bosses.

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Hidden Line rendering in VW has always been a bit of a mystery to me. I use a combination of a Renderworks Style and Hidden Line for the majority of my sheet layer viewports. I use it because its the only mode that guarantees the edges will look good regardless of whether there's intersecting geometry or not. I've tried the others and I wish that VW would concentrate on one single hidden line mode that had both speed and accuracy (well two maybe, one with vector line output and one without). It should be able to replace wireframe. Other software seems to be able to do it so I'm not sure why its such a challenge.

 

VW has put a lot of eggs in the vector output for PDFs aspect of Hidden Line. Ironically this is something that is often not needed and can cause immensely bloated PDF files. Lately I've found myself exporting PNG images of my sheets and combining those into a PDF drawing set in Acrobat. They are essentially the "flattened" PDFs many of us have wished for. They are nice, clean drawings at 300dpi where the fonts won't vary and there's a high level of compression on the white areas of the sheet. I only wish that they could maintain hyperlinks and other metadata.

 

I think we're all waiting for basic line drawing sheet layer viewports we don't have to ever update. Some programs have only ever had this.

 

As I watch a Sheet Layer Viewport update I often wonder what's happening. Usually you can see the "hidden line" portion well before the rendering finishes and the status shows "Calculating edges" multiple times in the process.

 

I wish I could use the Custom Renderworks "draw edges" mode but its just not very good. I also wish I could use OpenGL "draw edges" but it doesn't deal with intersecting geometry, doesn't deal with curves as wall as Hidden Line and parts of it often get clipped off at the edges of Viewports by some sort of internal "crop".

 

Kevin

 

 

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1 hour ago, Chih-Pin said:

Suggestion heard, I will raise discussions with my colleagues and bosses.

Yes please, a fast hidden line rendering would be really useful to have.

 

Because of this topic I converted a 3D model from VW to DWG, the model has a footprint of approx. 100 m x 500 m, an overall height of 120 m not counting extending items and contains 16,000+ objects (some of which are groups, additions etc, so not counting sub-objects). The model contains quite a bit of steel structures and equipment covering each other, so lots of hidden lines to calculate.

 

In Bricscad (aka B-thing) the hidden line render of this model took 1 minute and then I could fly around the model without it having to re-render.

The hidden line render in VW of this same model was still being calculated after over 20 minutes, so VW is biting the dust badly in this regard without a fast hidden line render option being generally available within VW instead of only viewport editing. It would be a bit strange if it would be more (time) efficient to export to DWG and do the hidden line rendering in a competing CAD program.

 

So again, yes please do keep pushing this fast hidden line request as sometimes hidden line is what is needed instead of a full OpenGL render.

 

(At least I guess the one good part of this is that it means I don't have to switch to Onshape for fast hidden line renders, so also no internet connection dependency :))

 

Edit:  now that I saw the fast hidden line render example above.... the hidden line render in B-thing looks like VW's standard hidden line render and not like the fast hidden line render in the example above, but I would still take the fast hidden line render if that is what it takes to massively improve the hidden line render speed

Edited by Art V
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I mostly have my viewports (Elevations and Sections) set to Unshaded Polygon + Hidden Line

(Because it resembles the Top Plan appearance most)

 

And I wonder,

since we now learned that VW standard HL is so slow,

that this combination is still multitudes faster than a single OpenGL with Line Display render mode ?

 

(Maybe because those many Image Props are not displayed in HL ?)

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26 minutes ago, zoomer said:

And I wonder,

since we now learned that VW standard HL is so slow,

that this combination is still multitudes faster than a single OpenGL with Line Display render mode ?

Yes, and OpenGL rendering in VW2018 seems to be slower than in VW2017 in general due to all the settings options I guess, but I have to take a closer look at rendering times as there was a message about geometry not being converted properly to VW2018 from VW2017. (had to do with shell solids, which was a bit problematic in VW2017 as well to create)

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47 minutes ago, digitalcarbon said:

Unknown.jpeg.db0beba3a5e99079e5a0addea3fbb017.jpeg

Not to worry you, but their V18 is supposed to be even faster than the current V17 I used. B|

Though I don't see how much faster they could really get with something like this (maybe one or two seconds?, will do some test when I get V18 just for curiosity's sake)
But yes, I agree there is quite a bit of work to be done in VW.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
On 11/4/2017 at 7:07 AM, digitalcarbon said:

maybe someone can enlighten me as to why Hidden Line Rendering in Onshape only took 3 seconds (yes, seconds not 3 min) but in VW it took 20 min? (shown below)

(hidden line render is between the top view and front view)


Most likely Onshape is using an OpenGL or similar variant to approximate what our hidden line looks like. You can do the same in OpenGL in Vectorworks by disabling color, shadows, texture and ambient occlusion in the OpenGL settings, enabling edges and then normally disabling all light in a scene other than ambient lighting set to 100%. Not as pretty as HL can be on complex curves and edges, but much faster.

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so...to set up a simple part drawing i have to know how to do all that??  I have no idea what you just said and i consider myself an experience user...how is a brand new person going too figure that all out?

 

as i type, my wife is in the other room setting up sheets and VPs for fabrication drawings in Onshape...i can't even imagine having her do this in VW 

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14 minutes ago, digitalcarbon said:

so...to set up a simple part drawing i have to know how to do all that??  I have no idea what you just said and i consider myself an experience user...how is a brand new person going too figure that all out?

 

as i type, my wife is in the other room setting up sheets and VPs for fabrication drawings in Onshape...i can't even imagine having her do this in VW 


If you have a specific wish that you'd like included, make sure it goes on the wishlist. General threads musing on differences between two applications are fine for community discussion and comparison but won't cause any change on their own.

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