Hi @andy, All,
Always good to see some improvements in Rhino display. Great that the “ambient occlusion /skylight” is getting some attention and the quality of display improved. My worry though is that it may end up being another ‘tease’ feature that shows some potential but is not very useful in production.
So far I can see this mode as a quick way to generate ambient occlusion pass, to be combined with the actual screenshot of different mode as an visual enhancement. Maybe I am wrong, but wasn’t that already possible to get such effect by tweaking i.e. copy of rendered mode that uses Skylight and custom material/background? What is new here apart from slightly improved quality and ‘out of the box’ access for less experienced users ?
More importantly, the way currently AO/Skylight is implemented is a step back as it produces ‘tiling’ effect on higher resolution screencaptures (see attached ‘b’) - something that old Skylight did not have a problem with.
We see similar problem with ShowZBuffer command (tiling).
Which brings me to another thing I would find very important and useful - being able to have control over the quality and radius of the AO effect. Currently the same exact scene and geometry shades differently depending of how much ‘zoomed’ we are in the viewport. Is it possible to have it camera-distance independent, rather world units radius based? That way would make it more predictable and probably got rid of the tiling effect that makes is not very useful right now.
Hope we can make it more than an ‘eye-candy’! If this gets implemented right along with making zbuffer/fog effect useful ( Better use of viewport ZBuffer functionality please ) discussed with @jeff a while ago, It would really bring Rhino to another level of viewport display and quality production output from the viewports.
Thanks for listening.
–jarek
