Display enhancement in V7!

[Kevin Morin]

Maarten, thanks for the incredibly enhanced display resolution of the V7.Delftship. My display is very clear- especially missing are the pixelated curves of Perspective views of the past! Perhaps recent versions just did not display as well on my system? For whatever reason the improvement is extremely welcome.

Cheers,
Kevin Morin
Kenai, AK, USA

[Robert Holme]

Yes thank you Martjen for a great revision and for bringing the forum back online.

Best Regards
Bob

[Peter Sharpe]

I’ve given v7 another go. I could get used to the new interface, although I am still not exactly in love with it. Given a good enough reason, I can use just about any interface.

In general the increased resolution of v7 is good. However, v7 does not seem to deal with crease edges at all well if the various forms of shading or curvature plotting used. Non-crease edges seem fine, but crease edges suffer badly from artifacts, meaning visualisation of the model is difficult if aiming for an aesthetically pleasing result. Also, in some views the crease edges are barely visible against shading, meaning it’s difficult to check the run of chines for aesthetics. Version 6 did not have these problems, even though it had coarser resolution.

So, if using crease edges a lot, v7 is not that wonderful in terms of gfx. The artifacts all over the place have to be traded off against the greater resolution, meaning it may or may not give better visualisation of the model. It’s less pixellated, but not nearly as clean as v6, and the greater clarity was sometimes more useful than the greater resolution.

If a way could be found to keep the resolution of v7 but improve the rendering of crease edges, the result would be pretty damned good in terms of gfx.

However, yes, some of the new functionality is good to have.

ETA: Thought of something else. I realise this has been mentioned before, and that the answer was that Delftship is primarily for commercial shipping where planking thickness subtraction is not relevant, but honestly with all the other calculations Delftship already handles, planking thickness subtraction would be a pretty trivial addition in terms of processing, and would greatly enhance the usefulness of the app for anyone who wished to use it for purposes other than designing commercial shipping.

[Robert Holme]

Maybe you need to change the fbm resolution

Best Regards
Bob

Attachments:

• AirFaith.bmp
• AirFaith2.bmp

[Maarten]

Hi Platypus,
This is the first time I hear about poor crease line visibility, we’ll have a look at it. Can you please send a screenshot?
Thanks!

[Peter Sharpe]

Sure. Screenshots attached.

Note for Maryak first: I always run the thing at maximum resolution so no, that’s not the problem.

Anyway, the first file show the artifacts at the crease edges. Basically, white pixels are thrown in along some crease edges (the lap lines, in this case) plus there is some bleeding of colours from nearby panels into other layers (the topsides colour is bleeding into the gunwales). If you have a number of crease edges in fairly close proximity, it all tends to run together and be a bit of a mess. This is with the crease edges set to thin in preferences. Setting them to thick makes things worse, so thin has to be used in practice.

Second file shows crease edges disappearing when shaded view is used. The second lowest one is completely invisible, while the next two up are very hard to distinguish in the profile view. I did find a partial workaround by setting control curves to black, which helps, but even they disappear from some angles, and they tend to have gaps in them.

Third file shows the lines plan, which does not appear to offer any way of giving more definition to crease edges.

Fourth file is another bug I discovered. The zebra shading colour setting appears to be broken, so the shading is stuck to black and white, which is a combination that is very harsh on the eyes. I wouldn’t actually use red. That was just selected to make the point about the setting not working.

Attachments:

• Crease_edge_artifacts.jpg
• Crease_edge_visibility_1.jpg
• Crease_edge_visibility_2.jpg
• Zebra_shading_colour_broken.jpg

[Peter Sharpe]

I just noticed that your forum app has resized and recompressed the .jpg’s I attached, which makes it a bit hard to see what is going on. If you want full-res shots I can do those by another method (other than attaching them here).

[Maarten]

Hi Platypus,

The atatchments are fine for us to understand the issue, thanks. It boils down to a rendering issue with several elements occurring at the same depth. We’ll look into this, but it may take some time…

[Peter Sharpe]

Got an update for you. For some reason, the rendering problems appear to have resolved themselves. I’m not entirely sure why this is.

It’s possible that there was some sort of temporary glitch in the new Delftship installation. However, I’ve also noticed that Michlet (which I also run) has begun misbehaving with its graphics, which Leo puts down to certain Windows updates not being compatible with the older code of Michlet.

I did install a Windows update recently. This, while apparently borking Michlet, may have fixed Delftship. I haven’t changed gfx card drivers recently, so it can’t be a driver thing.

Anyway, for whatever reason, with the current config of my box the Delftship 7.11 graphics are now perfect. This is great, except that it means the gfx may be vulnerable to future Windows updates. Will have to wait and see if Windows does anything evil.

Just thought you should know. Cheers.

PS: The zebra shading colour setting (under the Preferences>Hullform menu) is still broken though, as per the earlier screenshot.

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