It would be really helpful if pressing the “Preview” button in the “Polygon mesh detailed options” window calculates the polygon count to give the user a convenient way to decide whether the modified settings offer better results with the meshing of NURBS objects. Currently, after every change in the meshing settings the user has no idea whether the changes are better or worse unless he or she closes the meshing window and runs the “Polygon count” command. The process is quite tedious, because every eventual change of these settings require another opening the “Polygon mesh detailed options” window and then running the “Polygon count” command all over again…
Hello - poking the Preview button prints the count on the command line - does that do what you need?
-Pascal
I just noticed that if I expand the command line to be 3 rows tall, it will show what was “invinsible” until that moment. Example:
“There would be 846 total triangular polygons in this selection after forced triangulation
Created a mesh with 733 points and 519 polygons.
Meshing… Press Esc to cancel”
By default, Rhino only showed “Meshing… Press Esc to cancel”, leaving the upper two rows hidden. It’s unfortunate that the user is forced to keep his or her working space smaller in order to be able to read the polygon count. I suggest to double the polygon count information in the lower area where Rhino shows the memory and CPU usage. That “information tab” area (or whatever its name is) is wide enough (uses only about 200 pixels, the rest is a blank space) and could be used in a more clever way. At the moment it’s as wide as half of the screen at 1920x1080 resolution.
I suggest to do the following in the future releases of Rhino:
Split that “information tab” into 3 sections, so that they show the following:
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The CPU and memory usage, file size, minutes from last safe, etc (basically what it shows in the current version of Rhino);
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The polygon count of the rendering/custom mesh of the selected object(s);
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Name of the currently selected object. If there are two or more selected objects, Rhino could list just the last selected one. It’s never good to be forced to open the Properties window to just read the object’s name. That takes time, extra mouse clicks and hides a large portion of the viewport. Currently, there is a way to select an object and the bottom quick-access layer panel (at the left side of the “Grid snap” panel) will show its layer (or “Varies” when selecting two or more objects that belong to different layers), but I can’t find any way to read the object’s name there.
Another way to improve in these lower information tabs is to expand the ability to read the current coordinate in the 3d space. At the moment, the very bottom left tab could be clicked to swap between “CPlane” and “World” coordinates. That’s great! However, when the cursor tool tip with “Point” option is enabled (Rhino Options > Modeling Aids > Cursor ToolTips > Point), that hovering window next to the mouse pointer will double the information shown at the coordinates tab. Changing between “World” and “CPlane” in the coordinates tab is also reflected in the mouse cursor tool tip. I can’t see a way to read both, the World and CPlane coordinates simultaneously. If the “Point” option had two ticks (named “Point (World)” and “Point (CPlane)” ), instead of a single one, that would bring some helpful information about the coordinates, which is especially useful while working with custom CPlanes.