I noticed that Rhino 7 has a series of noticeable downgrades compared to Rhino 6 in the way of selecting custom colours via the “Select color” pop-up window (the “Custom color list” preset must be selected). This is sad, because the implementation in Rhino 6 was much more user-friendly.
Rhino 6 allowed to press and hold the left mouse button over any colour and then move the mouse pointer up or down, in order to DYNAMICALLY select the desired colour. That also helped with adjusting the choice at the lest moment, if a wrong colour was selected. However, Rhino 7 introduced a completely different menu for the “Select color” pop-up window that will no longer allow a dynamic selection of the custom colour. Instead, it will require an extra mouse click to choose a different colour, if a wrong one was selected in the last moment.
The list of custom colours in Rhino 6 had an auto-scrolling function that worked wonderfully well. Rhino’7 auto-scrolling is broken, does not work most of the time and will stop after browsing through a few colours at the down direction. Picking a colour at the top will not trigger an auto-scrolling to the up direction. This is very strange, especially when Rhino 6 had it executed so well.
Also, Rhino 6 allowed to press and hold the mouse pointed over any colour from the list and then rotate the mouse wheel to scroll through the entire list of available colours. Rhino 7 will not let you do the same; instead, upon selection of a colour it will lock the window and it will no longer be able to scroww up or down unless the mouse button is released again.
Rhino 6 showed a list of custom colours and HSV (hue, saturation, value) picker simultaneously. Rhino 7 no longer allows this and instead will force you to use either a list of colours or a HSV picker, but never both.
Rhino 6’ HSV picker showed the numerical values of Hue, Saturation, Value, Red, Green and Blue in their respective boxes in real time. They were also very handy for manual modification of the values. However, Rhino 7’s HSV colour picker lacks those useful 6 boxes and replaced them with an Opacity slider.
Looks like other people already were requesting this more than 8 months ago (while Rhino 7 was still not officially released), but sadly the removed functionality from Rhino 6 is still not fixed in the most recent Rhino 7…
But my list of 5 downgrades also includes: removed auto-scrolling, removed ability to scroll with the mouse wheel while a colour is being selected with the LMB, and ability to browse through colours while the LMB is held and the mouse if moved up or down.
I see downgrades everywhere in that particular pop-up window. Sure, they have added some extra options in the form of optional other colour picking standards (something that the majority of Rhino users will never use), but removed all the good functionality from Rhino 6. I’m really surprised…
I can’t imagine how much worse it could be. It’s already way worse than Rhino 6’s “Select color” pop-up window, which was extremely user-friendly due to its cleverly made UI and mouse functionality.
I just tried the two approaches side by side and found that I prefer the R7 scroll wheel/click approach to the R6 hold-button/slide-or-scroll. Holding a mouse button down is more of a strain on your finger than the movement of clicking (I’ve had RSI so maybe I’m over-attuned to this). And I find the autoscroll in R6 uneven so you tend to overshoot and go back whereas the scroll wheel allows finer control.
I find the R7 approach intuitive - I guess what seems “right” depends on what you are used to.
I don’t see this limitation (R7,4) or I’m misunderstanding. EDIT: If you only see the wheel, enlarge the panel - when it gets small the list disappears.
Yes! It would be so much better to be able to see and edit the values alongside the colour wheels rather than having to toggle between wheel and slider windows. And preferably to see RGB alongside whichever other model your are looking at. The GIMP colour picker, for example, allows you to see and edit wheel, RGB sliders, HSV/HSL sliders and values in the same panel.
Overall, once I got used to it I found the R7 picker better than the R6, except in this last respect. If McNeel can push on to produce a combined display like the GIMP one (allowing them the constraint that some aspects would have to disappear if you reduce the panel size) then I’ll be very happy.
I’m not overly fond of the new picker setup either.
The color wheel is missing from sliders/boxes panels; or, stated differently, the boxes/sliders are missing from the color wheels panels. IMO they could be combined into one, which would leave us with 5 different panels - RGB/HSV/HSL/CMYK plus Custom - instead of 8 currently. Would make a whole lot more sense to me.
You can still scroll first, then click on a colour in Rhino 6. But it also allows you to click first and then scroll. It basically gives you both options. Rhino 7, however, will not allow you to click and scroll, which I find as a huge limitation, because it won’t let me choose the right colour if a accidentally click on a nearby one.
Also, the auto-scroll speed in Rhino 6’s vertical list of colours has a variable speed depending on how far you move the mouse up or down during that time. It’s very intuitive. Rhino 7’s approach, as I mentioned in my previous post, has huge problems with the auto-scrolling. On my Rhino 7 (7.2.21021.7001, 21.1.2021 г) it will not let me auto-scroll up above. Instead, it works with noticeable random stops only towards bottom, and only if I click on the lowest visible colour in the list (huuuuugely user-unfriendly).
If I make the “Select color” window big enough and set it to “HSV color wheel”, then both, the custom colour list and the HSV wheel are shown, but the 6 boxes with HSVRGB numerical controls are still missing. And the buggy auto-scroll is still there to cause problems.
Lastly, if I click on a colour on the vertical list and rotate my mouse wheel, Rhino 7 will refuse to scroll the list up or down. That was a very usable feature in Rhino 6. Why it was removed in Rhino 7?
Thank you, Pascal! I really hope that these things will be sorted out in one of the future service releases. Rhino 6 did it right.
PS: By the way, Rhino 7.4 crashed just a minute after opening an existing 3d model. The crash happened while I was scrolling with the mouse wheel through the default basic object colours in the Properties panel. I sent the report to “McNeel”.
I run the latest Rhino 7 (7.5.21068.13001, 2021-03-09) and noticed that there is a massive slowdown if too many colours are shown at the colour picker pop-up windows. This is very annoying as it requires waiting every time I need to change the colour or material colour of an object. At the 1:09 minute of the first video you can see that the pop-up window even closed by itself due to a temporary freezing of Rhino 7.
I’m colour blind and this list is important for me, because it also mentions the name of each main custom colour. I would like for it to be taller to see more colour names, but without the penalty to have it freezing for several seconds each time it opens.
Another problem is that, both, the HSV colour wheel and the HSVRGB sliders re-arrange automatically if the pop-up window is being increased only in height. Is not it more logical to have them fixed in size and arrangement (at least optionally, with a tick box) to prevent such an unwanted change of the looks? Seems like the wheel itself does not have a fixed maximum size and could get really huge if I extend the window vertically to allow more colours to be visible in the list on the left side. This also increases the time in which Rhino freezes.
There is still a substantial lag and even freezing with a white screen for up to 5-7 seconds while trying to open the pop-up window consisting the HSV color wheel together with the colour list on the left side. It seems that the problem comes from the lack of a size limit for the HVS colour wheel, which causes the later to become extremely huge so that the pop-up window consumes like 1/2 of the width and 2/3 of the height of my 43" 4K screen while still unable to show the RGB sliders… This is a major issue, because nobody needs a giant HSV colour if the sliders can’t show up properly.
Could you add an option to limit the diameter of the HSV wheel to user-set size, please!? I don’t see a reason to have the HSV wheel larger than 400-550 pixels on a 4K screen.
5-6 seconds lag, Rhino freezes, can’t render the RGB sliders:
1 second lag, able to render the RGB sliders BUT only if the colour list on the left side is NOT showing the purple colour (expanding the pop-up window to show purple increases the lag to 6-7 seconds):
Also, being able to scroll the mouse pointer vertically through the names of the colours in the vertical colour list was a nice improvement recently, though there is still impossible to do that while trying to scrow though the colourred boxes on the left side of their names. In Rhino 6 that was perfectly smooth.
I run Rhino 7 (7.5.21100.3001, 2021-04-10), but the temporary freezing was present on older versions, as well. But now it’s even longer, especially when I expand the HSV colour wheel window to be super large.
I installed the latest Servise release candidate (7.8.21160.5001, 2021-06-09) and could confirm that it takes between 1 and 2 seconds for the “Select color” window to show up. In a completely newly opened session with a single box, sometimes it takes just 1 second, other times it takes 2 seconds with a temporary freezing of Rhino in the second case. I can definitely see an improvement here. Even if I increase the size of the window so that the coloured wheel gets giant, the delay is never above 2 seconds.
On a side note, is it possible to also improve the anti-aliasing of the HSV coloured wheel? I use a grey background for that pop-up window and seems like there is a white surrounding that makes the HSV colour wheel a bit pixelated even on a 4K screen.
I still think that it’s a must to add a size limiter (accessible either from the general Rhino options or from the settings button on the right side of the drop-down menu in he “select color” panel) so that the user could choose an appropriate size for it. That would also give the user a better control over the sliders, as well. Currently, the HSV wheel is way too big and there is plenty of unused space next to it, while the sliders won’t show up unless the panel is widened by a lot. Also, the left vertical list of colours gets widened for no reason, taking even more space, thus preventing to see the sliders.
The images below show how strangely the “Select color” window behaves while its size is being changed.
Here, the HSV wheel could be half the size and it would be still perfectly usable, but with the added benefit to see all the sliders below it or on its right side:
Widening the windows does nothing. If the HSV wheel was locked to the left side, there would be more space for the sliders on the right side of it. However, this is not the case here:
Widening the window even further increases the width of the vertical list of colours for no reason, which actually reduces the space around the HSV wheel:
Finally, the sliders show up only id the windows is being widened to this size. Notice that the unused space on the left vertical list with custom colours is a pure waste of space.
But it also allows you to click first and then scroll. It basically gives you both options. Rhino 7, however, will not allow you to click and scroll, which I find as a huge limitation, because it won’t let me choose the right colour if a accidentally click on a nearby one.
It seems that the problem comes from the lack of a size limit for the HVS colour wheel, which causes the later to become extremely huge so that the pop-up window consumes like 1/2 of the width and 2/3 of the height of my 43" 4K screen while still unable to show the RGB sliders… This is a major issue, because nobody needs a giant HSV colour if the sliders can’t show up properly.
I don’t see a reason to have the HSV wheel larger than 400-550 pixels on a 4K screen.
