TEXMAP extension thoughts and findings.

[Joshua Delahunty]

I attempted to test CYLINDRICAL with LDCad last night, and either got no image (P3 even with P1) or a scrambled one (P3 even with P2).  It was very strange.

Seems to work fine for me (in 1.6a):

<snip>

Do you have smile.png available for download on the web?


Roland Melkert> As you see it uses P3 at the top, I will change this for 1.6b unless anyone thinks bot planer and cylindrical should use top for uniformity ?

[I admit my point following is of a semantic nature only]

I would argue the top would be for *intuitiveness* (rather than uniformity), since the triangle formed by CYLINDRICAL is orthogonal to the triangle defined for PLANAR (and my original reasoning was, put P3 at the base so that the part designer could try to remember that the triangle for PLANAR was wider at top than at bottom, and the plane of the triangle faces the viewer, whereas the CYLINDRICAL had the wider part at the bottom, and was "viewed" edge-on (also in PLANAR P3 defines an endpoint, while in CYLINDRICAL it defines a midpoint).  I was specifically thinking that making them as different as possible in all ways was better than having things in common.

I'm not arguing it should not change (as intuitiveness is obviously subjective), I am saying that I don't personally feel that P3 at "top" is uniform with how PLANAR is defined.  I'd be happy with P3 in either location, and if more people (so far, 2 to my 1) felt it makes more sense in the top position, that's far more important than my initial intention (putting it at the bottom).

In other news, my buddy changed Foundry last night to render textures correctly on transparent geometry, something that none of the platforms currently does right (including Foundry, as the reference platform).  LeoCAD is close, he's using a shader to get the desired effect.

(The issue is, nearly every renderer will render the texture transparently when applied to transparent geometry, when the alpha of the texture and the alpha of geometry need to combine, with opaque alpha on the texture overriding any alpha of the underlying part.  Both GL_DECAL and GL_REPLACE give the wrong results).  I presumed we'd HAVE to go to a shader solution (something I don't really mind because it was always presumed to be needed for proper GLOSSMAP support), but Foundry is apparently doing a double render manuever to get the desired results.

> Transparent is very problematici ndeed (especially since LDCad 1.x uses fixed piped line), it also has to do with draw order on top of the normal trans draw order issues.

That sounds like some of the issues Travis is facing with LDView.

> 2.0 uses >= GL 3.0 so custom shaders for everything will have to revisit the problem when the time comes.

I look forward to a really good textured, bump-mapped rubber eventually... ;-)

      -- joshua