Vanishing models...

[isobarxx]

Uh... maybe it's to do with the openGL clipping plane? Does the display become more stable if you make the grid bigger/smaller?

[DMack]

To a degree but it's still awkward to work with. I'm wondering if I cut my geometry up whether that might help - though not a great solution.

Are there any settings on the GFX card or within messiah that alter how things are drawn? I'm surprised this hasn't reared its head more often. I'm guessing it happens when you have objects of vastly different sizes. I've got a couple of characters in a big landscape (say 200 by 200 meters versus a character that's 1m high)

[Nichod]

Have you verified your models normals are pointed in the correct direction?

[WesComan]

I discussed this problem with Lyle waayyy back. It's something to do with how messiah optimises the scene for playback speed. As the vertices move outside the view they are 'ignored', so if the object has most or all of its vertices outside the view the object itself will disappear. The only way to fix it is to chop up the object into smaller pieces (you could do this with proxy objects leaving your original large object intact).

[DMack]

Hey - Thanks Wes, I'd literally chopped the object up (it works!) and was coming back here to let everyone know how to avoid it! You beat me to it.....and with an explanation. I can live with it - If it's part of what makes messiah so lightning fast on the update/redraw, then I'd like it left well alone!!

Thanks again.

David

[numberEleven]

"It's as if you can only see large meshes at certain angles???"

Sound like there is a vertice threshold that might be in there somewhere. If messiah is ignoring objects that only have a fairly low percentage of an objects vertices shown in window, then that could be it. There might be a way to increase, or adjust that value, either one time in the algorithm, or provide a adjuster in the UI. You might solve the problem with a "show all objects" as a default, and then a switch somewhere like "optimize object view in viewport by ingoring objects with large offscreen vertice counts " to set the engine to perform as it does now in the event a user needs a little extra speed.

Those are horrible names, but, the idea is already there im sure, and has been thought about.

Hey, another idea that might be great, is to have a switch something like . . .

"Use primitive as object viewport cull" - Maybe you could put a box primitive in the worldview, and have it define what is visible globally so you can focus on an specific area of a large scene. Might be nice. I dont know if that would increase speeds, but, it seems like it might if done right.

Looking forward to what these guys release, thank you for making the current available version a fairly solid tool.

-Garin

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