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how come setting the FD modifies the z-buffer of the rhino viewport?

in big scenes (with geometry far out) i always loose the vision of what is in front of me, when i set the fd further away.

i there actually a way to set it manually?

thnx!

daniel

The Maxwell camera's focal point is taken from the focal point of its associated Rhino view. So to ask for setting it manually, you are asking to disconnect it from the view; if it were disconnected though, how would you use a Rhino view to set up a Maxwell camera? If setting the focal point to some particular distance screws up the clipping of your Rhino view, that is a problem with the Rhino view -- you could just as easily cause it by means other than (i.e. scripting, etc) the plugin, because that's all the plugin is doing: setting the view's focal point.

.. so it is placing the target without changing the view?

If i understand right, all maxwell attributes are derived from the rhino cam.

From the user pov this is problematic, when the scene is big, like arch scale stuff.
I don't want to blame rhino's outdated camera model to the plug in in any way, but personally i would not mind to detach fd from the rest of the cam, as most important to me is that i can see what i will be rendering.

If you activate your perspective viewport and hit F6, then watch the camera in the top viewport when you set the focal distance, you can quickly see exactly what's happening.

So basically, you want something like a focal distance override? It would look alot like the z-clip plane values in the camera UI. And when you moved the camera, everything would go out of focus, since the focal point would be figured from the camera's location, rather than from Rhino's focal point. Is that the basic idea?

JDHill wrote: So basically, you want something like a focal distance override? It would look alot like the z-clip plane values in the camera UI. And when you moved the camera, everything would go out of focus, since the focal point would be figured from the camera's location, rather than from Rhino's focal point. Is that the basic idea?

something like that yes, i imagined it as a fixed length from camera in direction of target, so that when i move the camera this relation is kept, and no matter where i go with the cam, i'll always be focused on the same distance.

..but as you mentioned this wish comes from a rhino problem. i still so much hope the viewport itself will be improved.. also in terms of lens shift and film gate.. sorry that this is landing on your table..

when i get the z-buffer problem, i can't even snap on any geometry close to the cam, as it's gone.. so it becomes quite painful messing around with several viewports, or setting target +5 times ..slowly crawling back to the camera location.. to reveal the tree which was was blocking the view

Well, it's not very difficult to add something like this, it just never occurred to me that anyone could want it. I would check though, whether using different units, precision, or tolerance could help; I might guess you're modeling very large spaces using mm or similar.

i will try some things out in this direction.
right now i am working in cm/0.01

...ah.. btw. a maxwell "groundplane" would be great!

sorry I did not totally understand the problem here.
but sometimes I got a scene where the foreground isn't visible in the perspective window. Is this a focal length problem? Wouldn't this be a problem of rhino itself?

Yes.. it is basically a rhino problem.
The graphics card can only display a certain range of z depth values, and depending on units used and size of the scene, this range can be to low or not "aligned" to what you want to see.

Rhino places the center of this range to the camera target, which is good when modelling; since the plugin uses the target to read out focal distance, so it can happen that your Target/FD has to be far away from you cam location, thus close objects get clipped.

if there was a value for fd to input manually, this could be avoided;
but you loose the direct link to the rhino cam.

..the reference to the "groundplane" was simply out of this motivation.. because drawing a large plane extending towards the horizon (like a few KM when modelling in scale) makes this problem show up immediately.

I can definitely add a ground-plane option. I put one in the SketchUp plugin, and the original geometry for it was -- of course -- generated in Rhino.

Is ther an actual way to make a ground plane in Rhino?

Not automatically -- you need to draw the geometry.