I can't see how having bright colors for selected vertices should be an improvement, since imo the problem with vertex-shading in the first place is to find non-selected vertices All vertices should be bright so that they are all easy to spot and the wireframe gives away their relations in space very well anyway.
To solve rapid viewpoint manipulation for "lazy z-dist info" (using info from the last frame), the mapped-edges function could compare the matrices of the last and current frames to see how much the camera orientation differs. If the matrices differ significantly, an extra traversal to compute z-dist info can be issued before rendering. This means doubling the processing, but since the view was changed rapidly, the user won't notice in any case. Smooth rotation of the scene using the mouse will still use a one-time traversal and be nicer on the CPU
A new patch is ready with the following changes...
1. -efbie- suggestion about only shading selected vertices
2. shading now works in edge/face selection mode
3. shading now works with the other mesh drawing options
4. user preferences added to set the minimum amout of shading
After much experimentation this weekend, I think that shading the vertices is a good idea. If you have a cluster of vertices it can be difficult to figure out which one(s) you need to select. Shading the edges doesn't really help in this area. I gave user the ability to 'turn off' vertex shading by setting the Vertex Shade Min = 255 in the User Preferences.
The updated info is at the usual link. I had some problems uploading the page and I think some of the pics are screwed up. The patch should be be okay. Let me know if you have any problems with it.
I checked out the lastest code this morning and built a new patch against it. There were some merge conflicts in drawobejct.c that I had to resolve. Hopefully everything is okay now...
Sorry for the lack of feedback, but my computer is broken atm so i will not be able to test it for the next weeks, you should post about this patch on the dev-mailing list or put it in the patch tracker, or ask to integrate it in tuhopuu, because i think your feature is really worth to be included in bf-blender.
You might want to check what the dev think of your patch, i'm just an user
Sorry for the lack of feedback, but my computer is broken atm so i will not be able to test it for the next weeks
No problem. Currently, I am cleaning the code up and working on adding coelurus original shading algorithm. Hopefully, I will be done by the time you are ready to test again and you will have a polished patch. Thanks for the help!
I am also having problems because some of the code that I am changing appears to be under moderate construction in CVS. So, I appologize if the patches don't work 100% with the latest version of Blender in CVS.
As far as getting the developers involved.... I would like to get the wrinkles out first. I am not entirely happy with the current patch.
I updated the patch and the webpage. The biggest improvement to the new patch is the shading of colors. I also fixed some minor drawing problems and cleaned up the code. The only issue that I still need to address is to find a better way to handle the Z-fighting problems.
Let me know if you find any bugs or have any ideas for improvement. Thanks!
the images on the webpage look very good.
I would use the feature if it produced what you have there.
large meshes can sometimes get confused in 3D space.
Okay, I finally got around to finishing this patch. There was a couple of drawing problems with the last patch that have been fixed. I am not aware of any bugs in the current patch.
As usual, the latest info and patch can be found here...
All vertices should be bright so that they are all easy to spot and the wireframe gives away their relations in space very well anyway.
