Display Styles are great, but I am wondering why Display Edge Options are exclusive to Mesh Elements instead of View Display Styles?
This would solve a lot of issues for when we are settings up Solids, or Parametric Models, or a combination of different types of solids and surfaces where the edges touch as a single seam line. A smooth Edge Display option will allow the showing or hiding of edge transitions, so they look like a single surface for plotting or model development.
Below are screenshots of the Display Styles dialog, and the Mesh Display Edge Options I would like to o have added to it.
Hello,
The edge hiding tool for meshes are inherent to the mesh element. I discovered this when importing 3rd party meshes that already had hidden edges and went digging through Bentleys API at the time only to discover the ability to hide/show edges was already a mesh function, but there just was not a interface/tool to implement it, so It didn't take much to convincing to add the tool icons.
Unfortunately smart/parametric solids/surfaces don't seem to have the ability to hide edges in the same way.
Although reading through the Parasolid documentation....
I agree that having a "Silhouette" edge option for display styles would be VERY useful.
I think this, along with the ability to hide/show edges based on edge "angles", could be built into a set of rules to create more interesting/useful drawing output.
Please send your examples (mockups) of how you would want to see output produced.
In my example I have cheated to create the mockup to demonstrate what I think is a simple to implement dirsplay rule (I could be wrong)
The background is simply a "shaded view with shadows" a semi glossy PBR material, a custom spherical sky.
The line work (cheated bit) is a 2D hidden line with lines weights altered via simple formula:
- if an edge is a silhouette edge (not connected to anything) make it weight 3
- if an edge is concave make it weight 2
- if an edge is flat (tangent) hide it
- if an edge is convex make it weight 1
For cut views, I think there are additional line processing rules that would be useful, eg. distance from camera to control line weight, or transparency etc.