Editor Test Patch D14

CTRL+O: load main object in modeller
CTRL+O: load vehicle (was CTRL+L in D13)
ALT+M: Merge points (previously known as Fuse points)
New feature to merge points by distance (in ALT+M dialog)
FIX: Crash on reload textures in map mode / wireframe view

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/102626

This post is part of one list from my notepad splitted into three separate topics:
LFS Suggestions
LFS Modeller Suggestions
LFS Editor Suggestions

LFSM:
1. Add: REDO UNDO! For selected points, items, actions (It's sad to lose changes). I've seen the reply
2. Add: Free scale whole model with mappings by ANY axis.
3. Fix: Texture page 1 pixel bug. Found in 0.6U earlier, confirmed as an overall LFS enviorment bug in 0.7+ (Example below in screenies).
4. Fix: LMB/RMB small/big (0.010/0.001) values adjustments are inverted:
a)Object position values
b)Point position values
c)Map locate/rotate values
5. Add: Multiple maps for same light map e.g. "l_tail1, l_tail2, l_tail3....l_tail9" (therefore no need for side/top maps + more light variations possible).
6. Add: Hi beam + Low beam lights separated.
7. Fix: Chat text overlaps and hides the mesh points. (Also would be nice to have it smaller and LESS annoying while you work on other things leaving highlited bugs for later fix).Someone mentioned before.

Questionable, but I'll share anyway:
10. Add: Fit mapping box by mesh boundaries in chosen view. (As in LFSCarImp - "Fit Material", not sure you ever tried LFSCImp (it was very useful but limited only by FRONT TOP LEFT RIGHT BOTTOM views), but anyway "Three points" way doesn't work right now on complicated shapes e.g. "8"-shaped model).

Note: I understand it can't be made by the finger click. I just shared some enhancements I would do if I could.

It would be nice if we could delete tris by deleting the points directly without having to go to tri and then back to point mode.

Quote from Evolution_R :

It would be nice if we could delete tris by deleting the points directly without having to go to tri and then back to point mode.

A point can be used by more than one LOD model or by triangles in hidden layers. This means it would have to remove all those triangles as well. Maybe there could be confirmation dialog before deleting the point, warning about this.

If you just want to delete tris used by one or more selected points, a quick way is to press S (select connected triangles) and press Delete.

Hello, I come again to put some suggestion here

Soooooo I just working on derivatives mod for a while, and I think we just missing out function to hide-unhide subobjects

For me, it's same crucial just like how we hide-unhide tris and points, so when we working on specific subobject, we can hide the other subobject that overlapping our view to recent subobject that we working on

Also, could we have options to merge 2 subobjects, beside merge sub to main which already exist?

Quote from ivancsx :

Hello, I come again to put some suggestion here

Soooooo I just working on derivatives mod for a while, and I think we just missing out function to hide-unhide subobjects

For me, it's same crucial just like how we hide-unhide tris and points, so when we working on specific subobject, we can hide the other subobject that overlapping our view to recent subobject that we working on

Also, could we have options to merge 2 subobjects, beside merge sub to main which already exist?

I would also like to have this feature. Sometimes I switch between multiple subobjects and do multiple small changes to each of them, but I don't want to get distracted by other subobjects. Technically, I could save a subobject, open it in Modeller, make changes, save it, then load it again through Vehicle editor, but that sounds too time consuming.

Something like a "single subobject mode" which would only show triangles and points of the currently selected subobject would be nice. Or the ability to hide/unhide a subobject sounds good too.

Quote from ivancsx :

........... I think we just missing out function to hide-unhide subobjects.........

Yeah. Would be great. I dream of a list with sububject names (as we have in maps or cutouts, for example) and have a button to the side of it that hides/unhides.

I like the idea of hiding subobjects and making that work like it does for triangles and points. I assume you would like the selection button and the visible model to disappear at once.

I also like the idea of merging subobjects. I think the key to this is to first allow multiple subobject selection, which could also be helpful when hiding objects or if you wanted to delete a few, move two subobjects together, etc.

(I like a lot of the other suggestions too but these seemed relevant to my point about multiple subobject object selection).

For now, I have added the often requested "named subobjects" in Test Patch D15, along with a vehicle editor crash fix.

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/102626

I'm updating the seats of my MZG Sedan mod and I can't actually see what I'm doing (wrong) because of the spam of bad normals error messages.
Would be nice if there was just one warning, thanks.

EDIT: The warnings keeps re-appearing only when I'm moving the point.
EDIT №2: named subobjects feature is very good, thanks!

Quote from Evolution_R :

I'm updating the seats of my MZG Sedan mod and I can't actually see what I'm doing (wrong) because of the spam of bad normals error messages.

I can see that spam isn't helpful, but...

Quote from Evolution_R :

At first I wrote it as a joke, but as Aleksandr_124rus posted, merge by distance (0.0001 m) should fix them.

Code wise, I'm not sure how hard would that be - to add "fuse/merge by distance" option.

I'm sure you know, I did add the merge by distance option. Does it not help in this case?

Quote from Scawen :

Does it not help in this case?

"Fuse/merge by distance" option is working great, yes.

The spam messages I got are because of my poor skills with the 3D modeler, so it's fine, I was a bit frustrated and that's why I posted, sorry.

No worries, the image you posted is a reminder that I need to make the notification less spammy.

Hello, I dont know where to ask if this normal, or bug, but let me break down the questions into 2 posts

First one, I tried to change S_PLATE_ALP to different mode, from ALPHA TEST and TREE EDGE ALPHA, whenever I exit from modeller, it resets to ALPHA only, is this bug or what?

why I test this, because in-game, I found out, when seeing that lettering I made, it doesnt show up when I'm viewing it from the exterior, but when in interior I could see it, I'm also seeing this differences both on Editor (LFSE general), 3D modeller mode, and in-game, which in 3D modeller it looks fine, but in Editor and in-game, the anomaly happens

this one might be minor, because I think it wont affect anything technically, but I just wanted to make sure this aint bug, this is just normal on recent graphical system only, I'm on modeller test patch D14 right now

I'm scratching my head many times, thinking if "am I done making those lettering double-sided? or I missed that?" but I just realized it's already double-sided

second and last, again, is this normal we cannot move or resize S_PLATE_ALP cutout? I have tried many times to resize it, but I just realized, whenever I drag the edge or center point on the cutout, it being reset to original place like what I've been screenshot it.

I think on LFSE earlier build, this isnt happen, that's why I'm asking if is this normal (and intended, since this are license plate, to get full fledge alphanumeric character), or this kind of bug

Quote from ivancsx :

First one, I tried to change S_PLATE_ALP to different mode, from ALPHA TEST and TREE EDGE ALPHA, whenever I exit from modeller, it resets to ALPHA only, is this bug or what?

This one might be just a LFS rendering quirk with regards to multiple surfaces requiring alpha blending

Quote from ivancsx :

First one, I tried to change S_PLATE_ALP to different mode, from ALPHA TEST and TREE EDGE ALPHA, whenever I exit from modeller, it resets to ALPHA only, is this bug or what?

It's not really a bug, but an issue caused by a rare case of an ALPHA surface writing to the Z-buffer, which is necessary for the car windows, for reasons I won't describe in detail here (to stop painted lines on roads behind the car appearing in front of the windows - a strange effect). Transparency is always annoying to deal with, because of the necessity to draw transparent surfaces in the correct order. Sometimes perfect solutions aren't practical, so we need a compromise.

I don't think it's possible to get around it, I tried changing the draw order but I see that LFS moves the s_plate_alp textures to the end of the list. I think I did that to prevent the alpha numbers messing up the look of the windows.

I think it's best to accept the anomaly and not worry about it, as it will rarely be noticed.

Quote from ivancsx :

second and last, again, is this normal we cannot move or resize S_PLATE_ALP cutout? I have tried many times to resize it, but I just realized, whenever I drag the edge or center point on the cutout, it being reset to original place like what I've been screenshot it.

This is because each number plate texture has up to four number plates on it (shared between different players) so LFS automatically positions the cutout to the right place.

As far as I can understand, you shouldn't need to adjust the cutout because you can adjust the mapping instead.

Quote from Scawen :

It's not really a bug...

Ahh okay okay, I assume it's all normal then, Thankyou for explanations Sir 😄

Quote from Scawen :

... I assume you would like the selection button and the visible model to disappear at once.

I've been thinking about control over hide-unhide subobject like in example in photoshop layers (pict 1), a toggle to hide or unhide one or some layers with eye icon checkbox, or hide-unhide folder with button like "select all" checkbox in windows explorer (pict 2) will do

but judging from how LFSE top-left menu looks like, I think it's quite tricky for you to put some layout to enable those control, but I hope you get the ideas about hide-unhide one or some subobjects and figured out how to implement that

havent tried to mess around with subobject names in D15 after updating, but the positioning pretty neat I would say, less confusing too because it's arranged by vertical lists, instead "too many A" buttons

Quote from Evolution_R :

I'm updating the seats of my MZG Sedan mod and I can't actually see what I'm doing (wrong) because of the spam of bad normals error messages.

I've tried eliminating that spam in Editor D16

It's not finished - I'd like to add a button to select the point or triangle that a message refers to.

Also maybe there should be a button to hide the vertical lines, in case there are a lot of them and they get in the way of fixing the problem.

isnt there a way to automatically fix them bad normals ?
I remember importing a model I built with another software, the model was clean, then I did some simple operation in Editor (i forgot wich) and it created many bad normal points, wich i dont know how to clean now.

@Scawen, haven't tried D16 yet, but it sounds nice!

Quote from turbofan :

isnt there a way to automatically fix them bad normals ?

The recently added merge by distance will fix them in some cases (when you have many points close together).

It has a new identifier for excessively small triangles which can be the cause of bad normals.

I can think of two main causes for bad normals. A 'bad normal' is when LFS can't understand which way a surface is pointing.

One example, is triangles, in the same smoothing group, in two opposite directions, based on the same points. So one triangle says "point faces that way" and other triangle says "point faces opposite way". Add these together, point doesn't face anywhere. Of course, triangles facing in opposite directions, based on the same points, need to be in their own smoothing groups, but LFS editor can't work that out, you have to do it manually.

Another example is extremely thin or tiny triangles. E.g. a triangle which is based on points that are in a line. Which direction does such a triangle face? Well that doesn't even make sense, geometrically it's just a line, although logically it has been specified as a triangle. That is a modelling error, but LFS editor cannot work out what you meant to do, or something like that. However, the new detection I added yesterday can help you find such thin triangles. Tip: sometimes use the "triangle buttons" to find the triangle referred to by the cyan line.

I am wondering if the tolerance for small/thin triangles need to be increased, to allow tiny ones. At the moment, the limit is down somewhere near 1 square millimeter which seems small enough to my mind, but apparently some models use a lot of such tiny triangles.

In D17 there is a convenient 'find' function to quickly select a point or triangle that is reported as having an issue.

well i found how to clean up those bad normals.
Now I remember, in my case the bad normals were created this way :
- imagine a box with one side exactly on the left/right mirroring axis
- when i mirror that box, the face adjacent to the mirror axis is duplicated, at the same place, but flipped,
This is the case of the first example u dscribe scawen : 2 faces, pointing opposite directions and sharing same edges, created by mirroring.
Now i fixed this by simply manually deleting those faces, ok.

I realize that this is actually one of the basic modelling issue in 3d, and on my 3d software, I have a function to remove those polygons. It's called "unify", and by one click it will cleanup those particular polygons by removing the one wich normal is not aligned with the adjacent ones.
It is quite usefull, because those polys are sometime very tricky to find.
We also have a mirror function, wich automatically cleans up things on the mirroring axis.

Regarding small triangles, to me 1 square millimeter area is negligible detail, or even could be seen as a modelling mistake, wich would warrant an automatic fuse/merge to simplify geometry.

edit: We also have a function to select 1 and 2 points polygons wich can be created in multiplying operations (like mirror), then we can easily remove those polys.

Quote from Scawen :

I've tried eliminating that spam in Editor D16

D16 (and D17) started showing this error which didn't before (tri index too small), I started fixing them (it looks like a bad normal with a very thin face). But it got me wondering why they were not detected in D15.

Edit: the button in D17 makes it really easy to fix them.
Edit №2: maybe raise the distance limit a little... (latest attached screenshot seems fine, yet there is an error), points are close, but not that close.