It would be nice if native Rhino Annotation Dots had an option to be occluded by other geometry or not.
Annotation Dots are supposed to make information visible and readable, but when they are all rendered in front of geometry they often fail to do that. This applies to both GH preview and Annotation Dots baked in the scene.
A simple boolean switch should do it. I don’t know if this should be a property of Annotation Dot or a View setting. Probably a property of an Annotation Dot that can be overridden by the View… but that is a stretch.
As a comparison, I am posting previews created by Screen-Oriented Text and Screen-Oriented Mesh components from the evergreen Human plugin. Of course, workarounds are possible, but this does not apply to native elements and you have to fiddle instead of displaying data.
The second wish is a bit complicated to describe and can be divided into basic and advanced functionality.
The basic one is the ability to set the Annotation Dot size in screen space size or scene size. Having a large and complicated model, some Annotation Dots seen from a distance may interfere with the display of those that are close.
Unreadable clutter in the background - note that this while using the Human Plugin, so it is much more readable anyways because Annotation Dots are occluded by the geometry.
Those that are far away can also overlap and make them completely illegible. For this reason, not only do they not fulfill their basic function, but they also create such an unpleasant “messy atmosphere” even in a tidy file.
The most advanced control over the size of the Annotation Dot would be to set:
the minimum and maximum sizes they can have relative to the scene
the minimum and maximum sizes they can have in screen space.
I know it might look complicated, but some clever, flexible solution is needed here.
Screen space size might be ok, but size related to the scene is exceeded
While not using Absolute sizing (screen space size lock) but only relying on the sizes related to the size of the Model Objects, Annotation Dots quickly become either too small or too big.
In short, two factors could be taken at the same time while creating a good formula while resizing the Annotation Dots - Model space size and the Screen Size.
Nice overview of how they should work, I asked this years ago but not near as eloquently as you have. This one feature add would be enough to get me to move to R8.
