Change color of wireframe?

[Tom-PierreFrappé-Sénéclauze]

Hi!

Is there any way to change the color of the wireframe on buildings? I'm caught between either having no wireframe, in which case the details are lost, and having a black wireframe that totally overwhelms the image for buildings that are far away. I'd like to replace it with something of the same color as the building, or something with transparency.

Or find a dynamic way to turn it off for far away buildings.

Is that possible?

thanks,
Tom

[MatthiasBuehler1 · Accepted solution]

Prefs > General > Viewport > Wireframe color

😉

[Tom-PierreFrappé-Sénéclauze]

Thanks Matthias!

That's simple. Though I wish there was a way to do that in the cga files, so that the wireframe can be set at the same color as the shape (a touch darker maybe, or just opaque when the shape has some transparency)...

I'm assuming I could use comp(e) to get a similar result, but fear it would over-complicate the models by a lot (ie how much ram does it take to divide some ~ 400 buildings into their edges??)

[MatthiasBuehler1]

wireframe itself has nothing to do with the geometry, that's just how the polygons are displayed, thus is independent of CGA.

creating polygons for each edge (to colorize them) is not a RAM issue, it's a polycount-issue, since you increase the amout of geometry massively. E.g. this kills the performance in a WebScene ..

But this would be the only way to drive this in CGA .. It depends on the use case of course ..

M.

[Tom-PierreFrappé-Sénéclauze]

Thanks Matthias.

So it would make a webscene slow, but not slow down rendering in CE? Why is that? (if explainable). Good to know either way.

I tried to colorize them using comp(3){all:color("#aaaaaa") } but to no avail. Is there something I am missing?

[MatthiasBuehler1]

Hi,

No, of course it also makes CityEngine 'slower', but CityEngine can handle much bigger datasets than you would want to put online. Usually, a complete WebScene including textures should be around 10 - 30 MBytes.


The comp(e) workaround just creates a lot more geometry that can be colored to 'highlight' the edges e.g black. Some people use this in WebScenes because the WebViewer currently does not have Wireframe rendering (line rendering).

It's just a 'hack' to mimic Wireframe rendering in WebScenes.

Ok ?