headus 3D tools

headd · Posts: 3 Joined: 19 Nov 2008

The problem that i have is that when i select multiple shells with the mouse in the uv view, that red rectangle that apears when selecting, is very slow, not in real-time.
Meaning when i click - drag the mouse over the shells and i release it, the rectangle apears after some seconds.

Another one is when i press F when i am not over an shell to flatten it
, the flatten box dialog appears; when i want to clear it by pressing enter, it dissapears after a few seconds..

Maybe it's the hardware? I have an Sempron 1800+ with 768mbRam and a AtiRadeon 9600..
I've tried it on another machine with nearly the same specs, but no problem there..

Thanks..

headus · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2008 5:28 pm Post subject:

It sounds like its going slow whenever the overlay graphics are being drawn.

Because not every graphics adapter supports hardware overlay planes, UVLayout simulates overlays by capturing a copy of the graphics in the window, then draws the red rectangle over the top of this copy for each frame of the rectangle expansion animation.

This can be sluggish with really old systems, but your slowdown sounds much worse than just sluggish, and even on my ancient 500MHz Gateway laptop its quite smooth.

I would play with your graphics adapter settings; maybe something can be turned on or off that will help?

Phil

headd · Posts: 3 Joined: 19 Nov 2008

Thanks Phil,

i've managed to get it done...after playing with the drivers for the video card i had no visible result. Anyway, modifying the quality settings from Ati Catalyst Control Center had impact over the way uvlayout looks, meaning, for example, the use of antialiasing makes uvlayout very fuzzy, both text and objects.

I decided to reinstal uvlayout...surprisingly, the selection works in real time now, and the same for the flatten box menu....i have no idea of the cause of that "lazyness"...and why reinstalling had an effect..

Great piece of software, can't even compare it to the uv editors from 3dsmax or maya..

Something oddd:
. for a reason i don't know, it started again...still small delay with operations on the mesh...hiding poligons with the H menu, canceling the flatten-box menu, an the selection rectangle acts sluggish...

i've exited uvlayout an run it again.. and voila..works fine... any idea?...

thanks

headus · Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2008 5:50 pm Post subject:

"i've exited uvlayout an run it again.. and voila..works fine... any idea?"

Sorry, you've got me stumped as well! Its looking like a graphics hardware/driver problem, which are normally only resolved with a graphics adapter change.

What I'll do though is put a toggle in somewhere to turn off the "overlay" graphics function. It wont look as nice, but will hopefully fix the slowdowns. Look for this in the next release (sometime next week I think).

Phil

headd · Posts: 3 Joined: 19 Nov 2008

Hey Phil, i found what is it that slows down the interface... Shocked

when uvlayout starts...the interface is small, "minimised" it seem to work flawless..everything is smooth ..
.if i maximize it or make the window bigger ..then the sluggines appears...

i've tried on an laptop with 1.45Ghz 1Gb ram and an AtiRadeonXpress 200M..
i've resized uvlayout's window on maximum on the laptop, the same aproximate size at which it scales on my monitor,
although it has 15" and it acts the same, working realtime.i can see it's a limit in resizing the uvlayout window, because i can't scale it larger than approx 1028x1024.

is my hardware that slow? i have an 19" monitor at 1028x1024..
i figure that is something wrong that i can't comprehend because, in gaming or aplications,
my computer (sempron 1.8ghz, 768ram, AtiRadeon 9600pro), performs way better than that laptop, in terms of graphic quality and framereate...

maybe software conflict? i don't know

thanks for the responses

headus · Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2008 1:50 am Post subject:

".if i maximize it or make the window bigger ..then the sluggines appears... "

The bigger the window, then the more pixels there are that need to be copied to simulate the overlay effect. Normally though its still very fast and hardly noticeable, but there must be something about your hardware or driver that's doing that one thing very badly (i.e. copying a block of pixels from RAM to screen). Being specific, its a BitBlt() call that I'm using.

Update ... I've done some reading, and there's a number of references to BitBlt() being slow. I'll look for an alternative method!

Phil

headus · Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 12:01 am Post subject:

I had a closer look at my code, and in fact I'm not using BltBit anymore ... I switched it over to some OpenGL code a while back.

Anyway, that still doesn't help you, so I've put a switch in there to turn off the overlay style drawing. If you set the HEADUS_OVERLAY_OFF environment variable, it'll just draw the selection rectangles without rubbing out, which means it doesn't do the big pixel copies. It doesn't look as good, but should be faster.

You can read about setting environment variables here ...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310519

This new switch is now available in the Windows Demo version of UVLayout, and will be in the next release of the Pro and Hobbyist versions.

Phil