Creative hacks to reduce grid?

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

Grid really slows down the graphics.

I’ve whined about this before… problem being I can only define the number of grid squares and the grid extends the same amount in every direction.

My models are always long and relatively thin, so what I need is a grid that’s like 40,000 squares in X+, 0 in X-, 15,000 in X+, 2,000 in X-, and like 6,000 in Y+ and Y-

Default grid is drawing like 20x as many squares as it needs to extending 40,000 in every direction really slowing things down.

Any ideas??? Clipping planes don’t hide the grid.

2

I suppose drawing the grid does take time. There’s always F7 to toggle it.

Sometimes I wish to be able to assign a quadrant, just +x,+y for example.

Perhaps this should become a topic on Serengeti. Perhaps even different numbers in x and y.

Don’ know how to enter this in Serengeti.

3

Or maybe be able to specify levels of detail vs. zoom. Like theres no way to see 1mm grid when looking at whole 40m long model but Rhino draws every mm and it really slows things down.

4

Do you really need a grid that dense? Grid Snap is set independently from the visual grid, so even if you use grid snapping, you could set that to 1mm and the visual grid to say 10mm or even larger… You would have at least 20x fewer lines to draw…

–Mitch

5

You’re probably right Mitch but the OCD in me likes it.

I still think it would be nice if the grid was a little more intelligent, like showed you .1 mm grid when the whole screen is 5mm wide, and kindof scaled back to 1m when the screen is 50 or 100m wide or whatever made sense.

As an experiment I made a grid with actual Rhino lines, and drawing 100,000 lines didn’t slow the performance down noticeably but the Rhno grid sure does. Maybe there is room for optimization in how that works? Is the grid not getting hardware accelerated or something?

6

Yeah, I agree that the grid is a little clunky in Rhino. I don’t know that at this point we can get anyone typing on that for V6, since we do not have an overall plan for rehashing it, but I’ll add a nudge to the bug tracker anyway. It may be that at least we can make draw more intelligently, even if the overall controls do not change yet.

-Pascal