I’m from the architecture industries and we often need to produce drawings with multiple lines overlapped together, with different line weights.
For Adobe Illustrator, the display order is the same as layer order: For instance, if I move L2 on top of L1, then all objects in L2 will displayed on top of objects in L1 (if they are overlapped, then L2 appear in front of L1).
However, as we recently want to test if we can do all the drawings in Rhino and remove Illustrator from our pipeline, we find that Rhino seems have a different display logic – Yes, and I use command like BringForward or BringToFront to move things up/down, but when there’re a lot of objects, things get messed up.
Would it be possible to add a feature as I described, in some future Rhino release?
In theory, if you don’t mess with the individual objects’ draw order, the display order should the layer order in the layer panel - from top (most in front) to bottom (most in rear). If you are not seeing that in V8, post an example file.
Note also this applies only to curves, hatches and annotation objects in the same plane. Surfaces, meshes, picture objects etc. are displayed by their physical distance from the camera in the active view - closer objects to the camera display in front of other objects further away.
I’m on Rhino7 and haven’t tried Rhino8, will do soon.
What do you mean by “mess with individual objects’ drawing order”? If Rhino respect the layer order (as you said), then command like bringForward or BringToFront should only move object within the corresponding layer.
I don’t think it works like that unfortunately, but I don’t really know exactly how “display by layer order” is programmed to interact with individual object display order attributes, so my comments here are just based on personal experience. When you assign a display order directly to an object by using one of the four commands, I believe it no longer obeys its layer’s display order at all.
Something like BringToFront will in any case make a curve or hatch display in front of everything else regardless of layer order.
Note also that the layer display order is only active in Ortho viewports…
The current draw order rules apply to vector printing of ortho viewports:
front order objects (bring forward, bring to front)
distance from camera order
for same distance; order based on layer
on single layer; annotation->solid hatches->other geometry
back order object (send back)
The draw order commands only apply to Annotations, Hatches, Details, Curves, and Point objects.
In ortho viewports, the same rules apply, but, additionally, all wires (Curves, Surface Edges, Mesh Edges, and Hatch Patterns) are slightly biased closer to the camera when they are drawn.
There are open bug items for transparent hatches and for gradient hatches.
-wim
