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[thecolclough]

not content with Scanline, OpenGL and the awesome ART, i'd like to suggest the addition of a fourth renderer. 

seriously.

i guess i'd better explain, hadn't i, before you all think i've run stark raving mad...    i'm thinking, how about a wireframe renderer?  we have 3 renderers to output faces, with all the associated paraphernalia of materials, textures, attributes, lighting, shadows... you get the idea.  but what if we wanted to output the edges instead?  okay, so it would be less used than the face renderers, but it'd be a cool feature to have, and i know i'd definitely use it if i had it available.

i imagine it would be quite simple to write compared to the existing renderers, as you'd be able to just ignore all face, material and light data.  all you'd need would be the edges data, a background colour (presumably the same as the scene's default), a foreground colour (you could have this default to the opposite of the background, i guess), and the antialiasing-or-not option.  and away you go!

the attached still gives some idea of the sort of output i'm thinking of - i made it by changing GUI settings (including turning off 'Transparent Faces'), using PrintScreen, and manipulating it in Paint to get the colours right.  so, i guess it's sort of doable without a built-in renderer.  however, if one wants to make a wireframe video, it's a slow, laborious process, and antialiasing is pretty much impossible, so it's far from ideal.  so i think a wire renderer would be very cool. 

what does everyone else think?

- colclough

[floyd86]

Good idea. But what about a flat shaded render,  I think that's more helpfull then a wireframe render. Just like a render you do with ART or scanline but the edges can be seen.

[headwax]

hya try anim8or 95 and choose opengl as the renderer

it will render faces with edges, they won't be transparent though ... unless you make the material transparent

[floyd86]

hya try anim8or 95 and choose opengl as the renderer

it will render faces with edges, they won't be transparent though ... unless you make the material transparent

I seems not to work for me, rendered several objects: no edges.

[kreator]

works fine with me!... all faces set at 0.01 trans makes the wireframe

It will work with all the other Versions .. so long as you render in OpenGL  (if its enabled on your Machine)

[thecolclough]

i'm in the same boat as floyd86 - 0.00 and 0.01 trans materials, OpenGL renderer... no edges.

[floyd86]

i'm in the same boat as floyd86 - 0.00 and 0.01 trans materials, OpenGL renderer... no edges.

Looks like we are on the wrong boat, it might even sink ^^.

[headwax]

Hello I only know this cause I rendered half  a movie accidently in wireframe when I first started off. Leslie showed me how to overide it. Can't remember how sorry.... was on the old org. So maybe you have the overide on? Something to do with gui or preferences. Can't reproduce turning it off

For me it only works on .95 not other versions.

[headwax]

http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=56329866838612676 First thing I made in anim8or as far as avi. If you can sit through it you will see some wireframes (without tranparent faces)

[thecolclough]

Looks like we are on the wrong boat, it might even sink ^^.

i'll grab a bucket and start bailing...

http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=56329866838612676

well, that does prove it's possible... but how to replicate it, eh... i guess i'll just have to do a bit more research!  i'll add it to my to-do list, somewhere around no. 48567 in terms of order-of-priority