[Smtk-developers] Possible new way of dealing with color

[Bob Obara]

Hi All,

We are in the process of cleaning up the color mechanism of CMB.  The main issue we are trying to address is the following:

Introduce “default colors” for various model entity types (vertices, edges, faces, volumes, etc..)  - For example being able to say all edges by default are to be blue while all faces should be white
The ability to specify the color for the specific model entity 
The ability to tell default color from explicit color


The Upper Left Image is the current Model Tree Display - the main problems I have with this is the following:
You can’t tell if the model entities colors are white (or in this case unset) - also the fact that the colors have actually been assigned randomly as their defaults
The icon is suppose to indicate if its a volume, face, edge, vertex, model, group, etc…  We never did follow through with this patter and as a result the icon doesn’t have a lot of meaning
Setting the color of a session or model doesn’t have an effect on rendering the geometry

My first alternative (Left Middle) was to make the icon more of a defined area my enclosing then - in fact my complete idea was to dashed the circle to indicate the fact that the color was not explicitly set and was being inherited but when I showed people it was not obvious that was what I meant

The third option removed the icon and used a simple circle to indicate color.  This is expanded on the right side where Vol 1 is explicitly green and Vol 2 is explicitly yellow.  Vols 3 and 4 are inheriting the default blue color of Element Blocks indicated by the hashed circle.

Comments?

Bob

Robert M. O'Bara, MEng.
Assistant Director of Scientific Computing

Kitware Inc.
28 Corporate Drive
Suite 101
Clifton Park, NY 12065

Phone: (518) 881- 4931




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/smtk-developers/attachments/20170224/ed6ea972/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: NewModelColorPanel.png
Type: image/png
Size: 112223 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/smtk-developers/attachments/20170224/ed6ea972/attachment-0001.png>