[REQ] Multiple Clipping Masks From A Single Viewport

[JQL]

Hi again,

I would love if we could find ways of easilly focus on scene details using multiple clipping masks in a more interesting way.

Right now we have this:

We could have this:

[eneroth3]

+1

Making the same viewport support numerous masks at once is probably really hard to implement but if I understand correctly the viewport would be duplicated and there would be one individual viewport for each mask. That would probably be much easier to implement.

[JQL]

We’re on the same page. Having a single viewport would be ideal but probably hard to implement.

However, if Trimble would get on the subject, probably a lot more workflows could be found and a lot of speed could be gained. Probably the scaling issue would also become manageable.

A page like this one has no more no less than 68 viewports of the same SU scene:

What this means is that a single scene is being rendered like it was, in fact, 68 new scenes.

It’s fairly easy to set it up and thought the FR would help with that, the real issue is that it takes minutes to render in my (fast) computer. In this case, SU style is in hidden line face mode, if the background would have textures it would be even harder to render. (I’m typing this message while it’s loading)

I Imagine that if Layout would store it as a single cached 2D image instead in of rendering a 3D model 68 times it would be 1000x faster.

I’m imagining that it is this image that could be referenced by the viewports, clipped, masked and moved around and loaded only once, speeding up things hugely.

I actually think, LO should generate every SU Scene being used in the LO file as a cached 2D vector+raster image.

Then, if it would be used two or more times, it would still render only once.

Viewports would then be only true clipping masks and render in a zip instead of the long render times we have now, for each time we change something on the viewport.

Sincerelly, the process LO uses right now, that renders a full 3D model in every viewport, is only useful for orbiting it and other cases where a full 3d model would be needed. However Layout is a 2D presentation software and we almost never orbit, manually zoom, or pan the viewports, as that breaks SU+LO scene relationship.

Some users do it though, so probably that is really needed (?). I guess so, so probably we could have 2 kinds of viewports:

• A 3D viewport, that works like today’s slow viewports, and has the freedom of 3D orbiting but most people that deal correctly with scenes don’t use;
• A 2D viewport, cached in LO, that is VERY fast to render, clip, stretch around and change scales but is strictly attached to a SU scene and has no freedom to orbit around inside LO. Maybe you wouldn’t even be able to change sun position and style, unless you’d change those in SU too.

Also, I imagine that exporters would also “like” the single viewport. We are, right now, exporting every single viewport to DWG as a single drawing. DWG files usually have viewports referencing to a larger drawing, and focusing on its details. This isn’t true always, but allows for much less info duplication in Model Space when people draft like that in DWG.

Anyway, I think globally, LO has one major flaw which is slow rendering, that exacerbates all other smaller flaws.

Caching 2D hybrid vector raster images based on SU scenes could help on that and help on the FR too.