[polynurb]

Hi!

i have another question regarding the HDR..
lately i bought some hdrs that are great but to big to be displayed in the rhino viewport. However it is the resolution i want to render with.. so i thought it would be helpful to have additional slot(s) called like "display" or "viewport" where one can load smaller proxy images (also jpg. etc), instead of loading the original hdr?

cheers,

daniel


* edit i just tried again.. and it worked.. but the hdr was a bit smaller (80 mb)

is there a known size limitation for the hdr conversion of the plugIn?

[JDHill]

Hmm...no, there is not any specific size limitation that I'm aware of. And...the original HDR is never displayed in the viewport (Rhino can't do that); whenever the plugin has to show you a non-native image (i.e. any inverted texture, TGA, MXI, HDR, etc., whether for the viewport, the preview in the open-file dialog, the texture editor), it reads it once, then creates a proxy bitmap in a temp folder; the proxy is all you ever see after this point. I'll try to see if I have any really big HDRs around here; hopefully I can get it to fault out too.

[polynurb]

hopefully I can get it to fault out too.

JD please don't waste much time on this.. i am not sure right now if it was only a redraw problem.. i loaded the image and the screen turned white.. but it always does that before rotating the view once..

[polynurb]

Hi Jd,

i have a little problem with the "show sun in viewport" options.

when turned on, the directional light interferes with the OpenGl viewport scale, so that line drawing is less precise.
when i check, render lights on layers that are off, sun remains invisible when it's layer is off.

It would be nice to get sun working without showing it's directional light in the viewport.

thanks,

Daniel

[JDHill]

I'm not sure, but do you mean that the plugin's sun light seems to behave differently than other directional lights? It used to be that the plugin used a point light very far from the origin, but this interfered with Rhino's line-drawing, since it doesn't like lights to be too far from the origin. How large is your scene; how far away is the sun light?

[polynurb]

sorry i was being unprecise...

i refered to using the sun as lightsource in the viewport (shadows in wip64).. and indeed the "use lights on layer that are off" has no effect on directional spotlights created in the viewport either. so that is a rhino thing..

also i was talking about parallel projection. the sun is about 300meters away, i use centimeter units, and the model is about 60x60x60 meters.

when i turn sun on, more wires and edges become visible, although they should be culled.. depending on the scene this effect is sometimes stronger, sometimes hardly apparent.

[JDHill]

I'm not sure there's anything I can do about that, the plugin uses the scene bounds to determine where the light should be placed, so as not to place it any further than necessary (trying to avoid problems like what you're describing). I'd guess that if the sun is 300m away from the scene in general, and if the size of this scene is around 60m, that the scene is set something like 90m away from x/y/z 0. If not, look for some piece of stray geometry floating out there that's causing this distance to be generated.

I see that the viewport sun function they're now building into Rhino appears to be using some light that's not visible to the scene at all - do you avoid these viewport issues when using that? I don't know if there is any function like this available to me, or if it's something internal, but I'll try to look into it.

[osuire]

I'd like to be able to locate the scene by double-clicking on the globe in sunview, rather than fiddling with latitude/longitude values.

[JDHill]

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

[osuire]

Hi JD,

Another similar one :

-Double-clicking on the map button of each property could bring up the map browser window.

And my little fantasy :

-A graphic link between the map preview and the material property to which it is attached would be nice.
I know it is written under the preview, but it takes too long to read
Sometimes, when editing numeric values for other properties, I find it confusing to see the map of another property.
This graphic link would help keep things clear in my mind, specially when the same bitmap is used for multiple properties, with just slight adjustments....




What do you think ?

[JDHill]

Double-clicking on the map button of each property could bring up the map browser window.

Have you tried right-clicking on the button? That toggles the texture editor's visibility and simultaneously selects the map in question.

And my little fantasy :

-A graphic link between the map preview and the material property to which it is attached would be nice.
I know it is written under the preview, but it takes too long to read
Sometimes, when editing numeric values for other properties, I find it confusing to see the map of another property.
This graphic link would help keep things clear in my mind, specially when the same bitmap is used for multiple properties, with just slight adjustments....

What do you think ?

Unfortunately, I think that the ui design is not even remotely prepared to handle doing something like that. For instance, what line would be drawn when the currently-selected texture does not belong to the currently-selected layer? You would probably need some completely different interface - a grasshopper-ish node based system or something. That's entirely possible to do (though not exactly a ten-minute job), but the prime goal with the plugin's material editor has always been to emulate the Maxwell MXED interface as closely as possible, within the constraints of being written on top of a completely different ui library.

If I ever get enough time to play around with the more fun side of things, I could experiment with something different though...if you have ideas of what you'd like to see in any clean-sheet approach, feel free to let me know.

[edit: for the time being, try this: go to the scene manager > options toolbar and load a different color profile - the browser should be preset to a directory which has three or four...try the gray one. That's the one I always use; it uses orange highlights on dark gray backgrounds, maybe it will make it easier for you to quickly see which texture is selected.]

[osuire]

Have you tried right-clicking on the button? That toggles the texture editor's visibility and simultaneously selects the map in question.

I'm not sure why I would want to hide the texture editor, but anyways, that's not what I'm looking for.
I'd like to browse for a texture directly by double-clicking on the property's mapping button instead of the browse button in the texture editor.
I feel it would save time plus it makes sense.

but the prime goal with the plugin's material editor has always been to emulate the Maxwell MXED interface as closely as possible

So that's a wish for the Maxwell UI then !

for the time being, try this: go to the scene manager > options toolbar and load a different color profile - the browser should be preset to a directory which has three or four...try the gray one. That's the one I always use; it uses orange highlights on dark gray backgrounds, maybe it will make it easier for you to quickly see which texture is selected.

Thanks JD. I was envisioning something more dramatic of course, but your suggestion does help.

[JDHill]

I'm not sure why I would want to hide the texture editor, but anyways, that's not what I'm looking for.
I'd like to browse for a texture directly by double-clicking on the property's mapping button instead of the browse button in the texture editor.
I feel it would save time plus it makes sense.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were asking about. I'll see what I can do on the double-click front.

[osuire]

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were asking about. I'll see what I can do on the double-click front.

Yayyy !

[hyltom]

Being able to import mxs file into Rhino ... at least import the geometry.