On Jan 21, 2011, at 5:18 PM, Jay Carlton wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Is there any way in MGED to hide dashed wireframes of deleted surfaces? For 
> instance, if I have a solid disc and delete a cylinder through it to make a 
> washer, and if the deleted cylinder is taller than the disc, I see the 
> surface of the deletion in the wireframe view. This situation comes up often, 
> and the ghost wireframes tend to clutter up the view.

Understandable.  It's one of many usability details that one tends to forget 
about over time. You get used to seeing through the clutter. (All I see now is 
blonde, brunette, redhead...)

Alas, there's not a way to just turn off the negative wireframes.  That said, 
there are a couple things you can do.  The 'ev' and 'E' commands can be used 
(for relatively small geometries) in place of the 'draw' (aka 'e') command.  
Those commands will draw evaluated surfaces.  Running "ev -T" can be 
particularly clean for some geometry.

The NURBS/BREP work is actually the long-term solution being worked on to 
address the problem, but it'll still be a while before that is ready.  With 
CSG-evaluated NURBS, we get clean simple wireframes fast that have perfectly 
clean lines. It coincidentally will also provide shaded displays too.  It's one 
of *many* reasons why we've spent so much time and effort working on proper 
NURBS support.

> One alternative is to minimize the volume of the deletion, but then I'd have 
> to update its dimensions every time the surviving solid changes. My 
> preference would be to have a through hold be "infinitely deep", so that it's 
> still a through hole if the part gets thicker.

Minimizing the volume of deletion will also improve ray-trace performance.  
Depending on your geometry, the savings can be roughly correlated with the 
percentage of volume reduced.  The preference you suggest of having a hold be 
"infinite" is something on the to-do list for next year.  Namely parametric 
object support so you can describe geometry relative to other geometry.  That's 
the foundation for modern "feature editing" where you describe holes, fillets, 
chamfers, slots, etc. 

Cheers!
Sean


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