Wireframe View?

Started by Mark-S, December 24, 2006, 07:49:05 AM

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Mark-S

Hokay, I dunno how possible something like this would be but aye, here is my idea:

When I create new scenes I generally focus on the clouds and the water.
For each of these it is pretty much the form I am looking for; big bulky clouds, large/small waves etc.
One thing that troubles me at times is that the preview render doesn't show all these details very quickly..
Obviously due to the Tech Preview but still in highly detailed scenes with fog, big volumetric clouds, water, rays.

My question is would it be possible to render your scene in wireframe (whether it be a full render or a preview render) and would it have any beneficiaries to the speed and being able to see what is actually there?

I'm a little brain dead at the moment lol :-\, wish I could make more sense.. work was hard..

Oshyan

I think this could be possible, but it would be similarly progressively refined as now. You might save some shading time, so it might be faster, but you'd lose all the color so you'd be without a lot of the important cues. As an optional mode it might be useful if it was significantly faster. But on the other hand I think nearly everything is tesselated to geometry so you might just end up with a sea of wireframe that is largely indistinguishable. Have to wait for Matt for a more precise answer. ;)

Suffice to say though that we will definitely be looking into alternate, faster preview methods. The one we have now is really the best all around approach I think. It lets us see everything in low but progressively refined detail. It is admittedly resource intensive, but once the rendering engine is optimized and multithreaded I think it will be much more usable, even for people without fast machines.

- Oshyan

JohnnyBoy

It's my experience that wireframes are useless in dense scenes. I would like to be able to swith to a realtime (shaded) preview mode when positioning the camera and then return to the current system for tweaking surfaces. But I can wait until the preview is multithreaded and just buy a quadcore processor. :)

efflux

#3
I think the realtime preview is OK for making adjustments to your camera and seeing basic results of colour, clouds etc and it's nice to be able to view from the top for camera/objects placement. In this view we only need to see the basic shading/shadows. I think it's cool the way the preview shows us results in context with what editing panel we have open to the left. In a program like Vue you have views similar to other 3D modeling apps which does make it very easy to set up models/camera etc. I found in that app that I used the top view a lot and side views are not so necessary because they are not so far removed from where you might set cameras up. So I would say just try to keep improving the two views that we have.

However I would like to see an option to make these views as floating windows because I would like to have my whole desktop as the node network with whatever windows I want floating above. I am making the assumption that we will eventually be able to collapse the main left panel of the app because we have a keyboard option for this. It doesn't appear to work yet and we can drag the top preview panel away but there is some desktop wastage with this. I would definitely like to see this preview and even the top view as a floating option.

jmaurer

What if there was a simplified Topo style view - simply for camera placement and easy scene nav. flat shading, basic detail that could be dialed in based off of how accurate the topo was. Meaning the outlines of the mesh were determined by the distance between topo lines, which you typed in - a 3meter differance would be really detailed while a 500meter differance would not be. Or you guys just code in some hard set presets.

You could do a 3D preview of this, but I think more useful would be a top down view where you could click and move the camera like in V0.9. By looking at the topo style map one should be able to determine quickly a good rough view/shot -then can switch over to the new camera for the fine detailing control.

I really enjoy the new preview system, but workin on a low end mac G4 (yeah I know its time to upgrade) makes it a bit slow at times. I don't mind the render times - it is the set up time that kills me.