'Flickering' viewport issue...

#1

Hey everyone, I checked over at the Modo forums, someone else had asked this same question but without any luck… So, I figured I would ask here =)

I am having an issue in the Modo viewport. Whenever I hover over or select a face (probably occurs elsewhere but this is the most obvious instance) the highlighted face appears to ‘flicker’.

If I had to describe it, a 60hz CRT type flicker. It’s almost as if my video card is rendering the opengl shading incorrectly and is causing the selection to shimmer.

I have the latest drivers and have forced modo to load with 4x, 8x, application controlled, and no for anti aliasing, and about every other option inside the nvidia control panel. If it’s worth mentioning, this XP installation is about a month old, so nearly all of the drivers are as new as they get.

I am testing older nvidia drivers just to see, but if anyone has esperienced this problem, i would love a bit of help =)

Thanks!

Ah, I always forget the details :wink:

WinXP SP2 - 32bit
GeForce 7600GT
Modo 203
Dell 2005fpw (20.1" Wide screen LCD running at 1680x1050@60)

Followup: I have reverted my video card drivers twice, both WHQL releases spanning back as far as a year, there wasn’t any visible change in the problem.

I installed Powerstrip and attempted to adjust the refresh timings of my LCD with no effect. I do know that lcds can suffer from visible lines in the display, I believe they are most noticable when viewing dvds. I figured it was worth a shot, since this issue most closely resembled a refresh rate problem.

I know i’m not the only one who has come across this issue with Modo, so I will keep this post updated on my latest efforts =]

#2

I suppose i’ll leave this as unresolved. I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s the culprit. I have changed every opengl/display setting available in modo, the nividia control pannel, etc. Tried running modo with different windows compatability modes (loading it with 2k fixed an old Maya glitch… was worth a shot).

It must be a hardware issue, either with my computer, or with my monitor.

Hopefully it will fix itself with the next release of modo, I’m looking forward to giving it another test with the next available trial =)

#3

are you sure you dont have 2 polys in the same space?
select the poly and then check how many polys are selected (right lower corner)

#4

try turning off vbo from modos preferences : )

#5

No luck with the VBO mode option, it doesn’t appear to effect the problem at all =[

but I did see that the VBO on/off was a fix for a lot of other issues, this must be an oddball problem…

And it’s not due to two polys fighting to be on top, to test, all I do is create a cube and switch to face selection mode.

Something that kinda narrows the problem, if I switch to Solid shading mode, the problem goes away. For the most part anyway, I believe the problem returns under certain viewport color UI’s. Which leads me to believe that it’s an OpenGL issue…

Quite strange!, thanks for the suggestions tho! =)

#6

I have never seen what you are referring to. While this will likely not solve the problem, you could go to this area in modo 203:

System>Prefs>Display>Colors and change the color of selection highlighting to something that minimizes the effect.

Thanks,
Bob

#7

Sorry about that, I strayed away from this thread, unfortunatly I wasn’t able to figure out the root cause of the issue. My trial has since expired, but after watching the 301 preview video I can say that even if the issue is still around, I will give 301 a very serious look.

Impressive stuff! =)

#8

12 days later…

I too recall seeing it (and not with overlapping polys), although I didn’t think it was as common as simply creating a cube and switching to poly mode. But by ridiculous chance I have the same monitor and graphics card at home, so I’ll check it later today when I get back.

#9

Yes, I do see it at home - but it’s obscenely fast and kind of hard to see. It seems almost as if Modo is drawing the regular polygon and then drawing the selection highlighting over it, instead of drawing it together. But it is so fast that I never noticed it before you pointed it, although it is, as you say, much akin to a 60 Hz CRT flicker.

#10

I’m not going crazy, wohoo!

Thank you for checking by the way, it is nice to know that the glitch is at least recreatable, given certain hardware.

Update, it does it on my 2007fpw as well.

Good luck Luxology! Hopefully you’re able to figure this one out =)

Thanks again for testing it on your setup :slight_smile:

#11

Actually, after talking to one of our guys, and looking at it a lot more, I think the answer is that we’re “all” crazy. It appears now that it’s actually one of the standard “eye movement” optical illusions - where the moire pattern of the polygon as a whole appears to flicker when our eyes move, by the way we focus.

Try this: make it so that one polygon fits basically the entire viewport. Now focus on just the portion of the highlighted polygon that is at the edge of where the viewport draws it. Does it look like it flickers at that edge? For me it doesn’t.

Another way that it seems to me - is that the effect seems most significant the farther away from the monitor I am.

#12

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.