About display-modes

Serengeti (Rhino WIP)
1

hey,

i tried to take a screencapture of the perspective viewport after adapting a custom display mode to my needs. i want the background to be transparent. this can be specified in the display-mode-settings but it doesn’t seem to work. of course i save as .png but i just can’t get the background to be transparent. there is also a checkbox for transparent background in the view-capture-settings but that also doesn’t help. probably it’s easy and i’m just not getting it, hope someone can help.

and

in technical mode i can’t find any way to control the dash pattern of the hidden lines. actually i’d prefer them to be not dashed at all but of solid color, light gray. as far as i see it, only line-color and line-width are editable. there’s got to be a way to achieve that right? i used to do this with make-2d, export to .ai and then the rest in illustrator, but i’m searching for less time consuming methods.

if this option doesn’t exist, then i would suggest it as wish for the wip.

like i expressed here before, i think display-modes have the potential to be very power- and usefull when it comes to visualizing work, especially when it’s more conceptual.

EDIT:
regarding transparency - actually the background is transparent, but because there is a grid laid over the whole picture, it didn’t look transparent to me at first. so transparency seems to be there but the grid looks like a bug, right?

backgr-test-08.png976×629 56.9 KB

EDIT2:
i made the following observation:

if you ScreenCaptureToFile a viewport which is not maximized, like one of the 4views which is default when you open rhino - then the strange “grid-overlay-bug” happens.

but if you maximize the viewport you want to ScreenCaptureToFile, it works and the .png with its transparent background is fine.

with a floating viewport, just some portion of the captured image is affected by the “grid-overlay-bug”

1 Like
2

Hi hitenter -

Yep, that is a bug and it is on the pile - thanks. I’ll add a comment with your discoveries about maximized and normal sized viewports.

-Pascal

3

@pascal
ok, but what about technical drawing and lines?

4

+1 to have the ability to choose desired hidden line, being able to change the kind of line, colour and scale would be very handy.

5

and another thing about the hidden lines in technical mode.
i noticed, the hidden / dashed lines don’t seem to be anti-aliased although it is turned on (x8) and all the other objects (curves, lines, edges, etc) are of course displayed with antialiasing.
weird

6

@pascal
again, display-mode technical, how can i change the dash pattern or no dashes at all?!
and what about the antialiasing issue?

edit:
here is a screencapture where you can see the behavior. normal lines are antialiased like they should be, but the hidden lines which are dashed are not being antialiased.:

technical-view-bug 02.png800×600 7.22 KB

7

Hi hitenter- I see that, thanks.

https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-38424

-Pascal

8

great,
but still no comment on bringing an option to control the dash-pattern of the hidden-lines?

9

@pascal
any news regarding this? I mean being able to control the dash pattern?

10

No news - I added a new wish item to our pile - not sure if the orgtinal was mis-filed or just… not filed… In any case it is for ‘down the road’, I would say.

thanks,

-Pascal

1 Like
11

OK, it’s on your list. That’s a start.
I’ll keep bugging you about this from time to time :wink:

12

Since this a just an OpenGL display trick and intended ONLY as a working display mode, I don’t think there’s much the developers can do.

Lots of people want to use it as a shortcut to a printable drawing, but that just isn’t possible. It was only ever intended as a working display mode to make visualizations a little easier.

That said, these requests are on the wish list.

13

It can be adjusted; I need to dig into this a little bit

15

Mac layout discussion

So this is NOT recommended creating 3-pane layouts with dimensions, etc.?

Are we forced to use the Make2D command to create layouts? Would be great to know, because we´re trying to reduce work at our office regarding 3-pane technical documentation (on the Mac, but this seems to belong to both versions).

16

Correct.
The “Technical” display mode is only that; a display mode.
For making clean line drawing Layouts, my best current practice is to:

  1. Create your model
  2. Generate 2D linework using Make2D
  3. Create Layout pages for printing
  4. Create Details in the layouts. Use HideInDetail to isolate only the curves you want in your detail. Set the display scale and lock the Detail
  5. Create dimensions in the Layout
17

Understood. Would have been very nice and fast to make use of “Technical” display mode, though. Any chance to get this supported as a feature for the layouts, not just a display mode?

So you make the dimensions IN the layout DETAIL?

Unitl now I´d…

  1. make the Make2D in 3-pane (in the model),
  2. add the dimensions, and
  3. place these 3 parts of the Make2D result in 3 discrete details on a layout page.

Did you mean that?

18

The intended workflow is, indeed, creating the dimensions IN the layout, on top of the detail.

Of course, since Make2D creates a static image of a (possibly) dynamic 3D model, you might as well “move space” the result of Make2D to paper space and dimension the model in the layout without using details. If you make a dimension style that correlates with the scaling you need to fit the 2D on the paper, that should be painless.

A possible advantage of doing this is that you could have a new layout per revision of the model (depending on a number of conditions…).

1 Like