Colored Wireframes And Technical Drawing?

So I was trying to figure out how to do colored wireframes with no luck and came across this thread on blenderartists.org. Looks like it’s been submitted several times over the years and rejected - will Blender ever get colored wireframes (according to that podcast it’s a “simple 4 line fix” they reject for hand-wavy reasons which sound like a developer leading a pissing contest.)

On a similar note - will there be more technical-drawing-specific features in the future? I did notice the other year they fixed a lot of the bugs in the boolean modifiers, which goes a long way in and of itself, but there’s still a lot lacking (the ruler/protractor isn’t really useful for anything, nothing is precise, you need addons to get details with higher decimal places, there are no vector-based drawing routines which would allow for lossless boolean operations in regard to precision and accuracy, no photoshop-style layer comps, snapping revisions to allow for snapping lines to angles, or even just calculating angles, points of intersection, etc - honestly I’m paranoid enough to believe the guys behind Blender are being paid off by the makers of AutoCAD at this point to tank any technical drawing functionality the way Oracle killed MySQL and seems to be the case with most open source projects of any notoriety.)

Bitching aside, wireframes and layer comps would go a huge way toward working with technical drawings of any degree of complexity - is any progress being made on this front I’m missing?

Short answer: If you’re trying to do real technical drawing in Blender, you’re probably making a mistake.

There’s a lot of reasons for this (and they’re searchable), but without rehashing all of them, the biggest thing is that Blender only does single precision floating point values. In most modern technical drawing and CAD scenarios, you need double precision. So giving Blender features that aren’t as beneficial outside of the realm of technical drawing and CAD would only give people the false impression of Blender’s capabilities and ultimately lead to disappointment because the proper underpinnings for CAD simply aren’t there.

It’d be like digging a ditch around a suburban home and then calling it a castle with a moat.

@fweeb well it depends i think on what one is trying to build.
CAD programs might work with double and blender with floats
But for example a 3D printer will never get to double precision (eventually stepper motors use a LONG or INT32 for steps).
Sure some operations will have negative impact on precision, and inaccuracy might then add up, but that just depends how one draws. It also depends on where you are going to use it in your process
Building houses for example requires less accuracy as compared to building optical instruments.
You might read : https://www.blender.org/user-stories/mathilde-ampe-automotive-design-with-blender/
And maybe (likely?) all you want is a demo concept machine

Then think of the rich and easy editing methods we have in Blender.

I’ve always been against wire colouring (i like rather white standard, instead of random colors to wireframes).
Though i think CoryG has a good point here, to be able to set a wire colour, imagine this per layer (as in technical drawings).
Would attract more technical users towards Blender.

It’s not really “they” who reject it, it’s Ton Roosendaal. He doesn’t believe in wireframes, it’s one of his pet peeves.

There are custom builds out there which have the colored wireframe patch applied, but I’m not sure if any one of them is in active maintenance.

Currently, the viewport code is being re-done for 2.8, so when that battle is over, maybe you’ll have custom wireframes.

On a similar note - will there be more technical-drawing-specific features in the future?

Not officially, this is out of the scope of this project. Blender is not designed for CAD, just like 3DSMax or Maya are not designed for CAD. For this, there’s a project called FreeCAD which is improving steadily.

As Fweeb says, there are also numerical precision issues which are unlikely to be solved.

I’m paranoid enough to believe the guys behind Blender are being paid off by the makers of AutoCAD at this point to tank any technical drawing functionality

Blender is fundamentally the wrong kind of tool for the job. If its developers were interested in improving technical drawing software, they would rather work on other projects.

@CoryG, layers are currently used for rendering purposes. It is possible to define what and how it needs to be rendered. If layers are used for wireframes too, it would complicate the collaboration among artists. E.g. if there is an artist in the team who is working with wireframes for any reason and another artist is responsible for the final rendering, it would be rather complicated to avoid conflicts. If the wireframe person moves an object to another layer to have a different color, the rendering guy would likely be pretty annoyed.
However, layers have been reworked too, but I haven’t worked with 2.8 yet and I don’t know whether this kind of workflow would now be possible.

This podcast contains the information why it is not in master:
http://www.blenderguru.com/podcasts/…mpbell-barton/

Just in case someone is interested, here are some more information about the improvements we can expect (7:19):

well wireframes are way of the ancients

new viewport capabilities show everything much much better (even wires)… start exploring & you’ll see

about double precision - try to make precise plan for a car or a simple residential/social housing…

don’t be blindly naive, rather get experienced why engineers and the industry needs such precise tools

Could you point out how the new viewport capabilities replace the function of traditional wire frames?

I don’t know about cars but you could definitely do a building plan in blender. +_ 10 years of do engineering related to build construction (shops, malls, office building, houses)and I have yet to see a plan use dimensions that go below a millimeter. For regular buildings trying to hold a tolerance of ± .5mm would be stupidly expensive.

float, double precision issues I think depend a lot on what people are doing with blender if you are using Blender to send parts to a cnc machine that are maybe 10 to 1000mm big with tolerances of +_ .05mm which covers a lot of jobs then float precision could be more than enough.

I know Blender is not a CAD program and personally would not use it as such but the are lots of other users in STEM who already do.

You need to press Z key to display limit to visible restriction icon, actually.
Which is inefficient because you have to press again the button to finally obtain desired result.

IMHO, it is not a feature but a weird buggy behaviour related to early states of 2.8.
Wireframe is the fastest way to check if geometry of our model is symmetrical.
As a check, it is not efficient to restrict it to edit mode. Because if check gives a green light, you don’t need to enter edit mode to correct the mesh.

Even if blender is not completely precise, it should definitely have better tools for precision modelling. Blender only works well for organic stuff. It’s quite awkward to use for anything else.

Not sure how you mean that. Do you think it should have tools which allow a more straight forward precise positioning, do you think that 64 bit numbers should be used or something else?

Uhhh, the new wireframe display is still wireframe though… It’s just a little bit better than what we currently have but it’s still not as useful as the differently colored wires that we have been requesting for years.

I did a little bit of research and it seems that with the new layer system in 2.8 which is called “Collections”, they may introduce colored wireframes. Very likely because that won’t interfere with other functionality like rendering.
I searched yesterday on a different comupter and don’t have links because of that.

+1 colored wireframes I used them quite a lot back in maya days.

I think one reason for not having colored wireframes is that the actual colors mean something , if it’s blue it means the geometry is linked.
If it’s green it means that the geometry is part of a group , if it’s gray means that the geometry is dupi-grouped (instancied with a dupligroup).
I think another way to communicate these things is needed before using colored wireframe more extensively.

I don’t think that current method communicates so well, if you have more than one group in the scene then you get all green objects, just confusing and more difficult to watch at; the same for dupli-groups and links as well.

paolo

Good grief, seems like we’re here again, pesky blender users still wanting colored wireframes.
Don’t all of you realize how wrong you are for wanting features you personally find useful?

What’s the matter with you people?

Good that you came here Choondiggle, we finally have someone who can tell us what is good or bad.
Maybe a bit harsh after just 8 posts but never mind.

paolo

Bit of an ironic retort seeing as I’m mocking the notion of developers vetoing a popular feature request thereby deciding what’s “good or bad” for the user.

Guessing the sarcasm went over your head.

Short answer: If you’re trying to do real technical drawing in Blender, you’re probably making a mistake.

There’s a lot of reasons for this (and they’re searchable), but without rehashing all of them, the biggest thing is that Blender only does single precision floating point values. In most modern technical drawing and CAD scenarios, you need double precision. So giving Blender features that aren’t as beneficial outside of the realm of technical drawing and CAD would only give people the false impression of Blender’s capabilities and ultimately lead to disappointment because the proper underpinnings for CAD simply aren’t there.

It’d be like digging a ditch around a suburban home and then calling it a castle with a moat.

To cut a long story short:

the following project has been researched, versioned, verified, detailed and simulated in context in Blender and presented to architects and clients multiple times. It was a part of a standard commercial architectural design workflow and along with a couple of other exterior and dozens of interior projects Blender was included in, is now being built.

http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=116644
http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=116645
http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=116646

It could have been sped up significantly if there were some half decent precision tools existent in so many other 3D apps for a long f–ing time. This need, and the fact blender is one painfully tantalizing step from achieving this produced the NP station addon. I made it myself in despair and disbelief. I’m tired of this mud.