Custom preview methods

Hi all,

I am starting to toy around with changing the appearance of GH elements beyond the typical red. I can certainly do this within GH itself with the custom preview, but I am trying to figure out where the methods for this sort of thing exist in the GH/Rhino libraries. To be clear, I'm not overly concerned with how things bake into Rhino, just how they appear in the GH preview.

I apologize for my lack of programming knowledge, and potential use of the incorrect terms.

Preemptive thank you!

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 30, 2016 at 11:01am

Each component draws its own preview, and each component usually gets the settings out of the document (green for selected, red for normal, by default). This means it's quite difficult to change that default behaviour.

You can however invoke the preview logic of objects and provide your own settings. I attached a file which draws the wires of all objects whose preview has been disabled, using the object InstanceID as a key for the colour.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 30, 2016 at 11:14am

Update, both wires and meshes are now customised, and now using a random generator.

ps. updated again, moved custom argument constructor out of loop.

Attachments:

various objects.gh, 13 KB

Permalink Reply by JR Swift on June 30, 2016 at 11:10am

Thanks David, you rock!!!

Permalink Reply by JR Swift on June 30, 2016 at 11:14am

So say my goal was to create a cube with each face having a different color. (These colors would not need to change once set initially). I gather what you are saying is that this would take a lot more than my basic understanding of C# scripting.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 30, 2016 at 11:15am

You certainly can't use the default preview pipelines if you want to add functionality like that. You'll have to actually code up the entire display from scratch.

Permalink Reply by JR Swift on June 30, 2016 at 11:35am

Fair enough. I'll either have to do some homework, or consider an alternative. Thanks a ton!

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 30, 2016 at 1:01pm

If you're happy to only draw previews for geometry inside your own component, that'll be relatively easy. It just means you'll have to add a component for each custom preview you want. The [Brep Topology] component draws breps with different colours per face.

Permalink Reply by JR Swift on June 30, 2016 at 2:15pm

Hmmm, that might be exactly what I am looking for. You da man! Thanks!

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