Dot Display rendering

Comment

Comment by Yijiang Huang on April 18, 2016 at 2:27am

Hi david, it's such a cool program! I really want to see how it works but the link you provide below has been expired.
Could you please post it again?

Comment by Christian Schmidts on March 13, 2015 at 5:08am

:)

Thank you that's exactly what i meant (and wasn't able to produce by my self):

Comment by David Rutten on March 13, 2015 at 4:13am

File here. Kinks in the curve are pretty ugly at the moment, but then I'm not sure it would be better if it were implemented officially.

Comment by David Rutten on March 13, 2015 at 2:49am

Of course it would be possible today using meshes. You can create consecutive quads that always face the camera and whose width varies depending on the distance to the camera. These can then be drawn using a transparent material.

Comment by Alexander on March 12, 2015 at 8:27pm

I think exposing something like this within grasshopper wouldn't be unreasonable. If there's somewhere broken/buggy but useful features belong its there. The effect christian is talking about is something I've gone through illustrator to achieve before. Doing so directly in grasshopper would be neat. Even tagging it as 'buggy' and then never fixing it would be a solid solution for most people. I'd just mark it up as one more reason rhino's become my do-all tool.

Comment by Christian Schmidts on March 12, 2015 at 4:29pm

Thank you for that clarification. So a general solution will not work - that makes sense now. 

But allowing transparency for curves as an option would still be beneficial. I work a lot in 2D for example. So one could make a component which works (properly) for curves only and gives you an illustrator-like look by lust adding up values:

   

Comment by David Rutten on March 12, 2015 at 1:13pm

I meant meshes are sorted by Rhino, GH does not sort its preview geometry at all, which is one reason it suffers from poor display quality.

All curves are draw first in Rhino, then meshes are drawn on top of that. If the curves can have transparency, then the meshes that are behind them will still be fully occluded in the z-buffer, and the transparent portion of the curve would show what was originally behind the curves. I think it would look really crappy really often. This is the effect you'll get:

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have functioning transparent curves in 3D, I just don't see a way of making it work. But again, you'll have to ask Jeff or Steve over on discourse whether it is even remotely possible/a good idea.

Comment by Christian Schmidts on March 12, 2015 at 11:33am

I understand. But wouldn't it then be possible to add an gh preview component which sorts the curves - so you would take the pain of an extra impact only optionally. Of course under the premise that Rhino6 would support this.     

Comment by David Rutten on March 12, 2015 at 10:17am

I doubt that's going to happen, but you'll need to ask Jeff or Steve over on discourse.

The big problem with transparent objects is that you actually have to draw them from back to front. Right now meshes are sorted before being drawn, but sorting curves as well would probably have a significant performance impact.

I'll already be very happy if they decide to add transparency to isocurves on shaded meshes. In those cases the draw order is known ahead of time, so no extra impact.

Comment by Christian Schmidts on March 12, 2015 at 10:03am

Shiny! What about curve transparency in the viewport in Rhino6?