Lines, resolution, jaggies etc.

[chrisjk]

I have recently started using Formz and like it on the whole but the terrible appearance of the drawn objects is both very annoying and off-putting. No other 3D or 2D software presents like this these days, it looks like something drawn in ASCII from the 70s or early 80s. Is there any way to force Formz to draw lines in a clean manner that takes advantage of the native screen resolution?

[Justin Montoya]

Can you please share a screen shot so we can see what you mean?  I suspect you are having a GPU driver issue.

[chrisjk]

Here are two screen shots; one is Formz, the other is Sketchup. At some magnifications it isn't too bad but sometimes selecting an edge can be difficult and erroneous. I was checking a dimension with the measure tool and kept getting answer that was slightly wrong, even though I redrew the part several times, I kept getting the same wrong result. I finally realised that when I magnified the area of the line I was trying to snap to, that the dimension was shown to be correct.

 

Oddly, when things are moving around on the screen, the lines all appear much finer and more like the clean Sketchup lines but as soon as they stop, they become jagged and thick again.

[AC1000]

I agree with you chrisjk. Antialiasing is poor and especially curved lines are sometimes very coarse when working in shaded mode (both, work and shaded mode). But the wireframe presentation is perfect. It is smooth and... beautiful. You can increase antialiasing (2x) in shaded mode but I am afraid it is not enough.

[Justin Montoya]

I see what you mean.  You can play with the Shaded Display options.  Turning off Silhouette and Antialias may help.  In Shaded Full you can turn up Multi-Sampling which helps make a clean image, though in my experience, saving an image in these modes is cleaner than what is displayed on the screen for some reason.

 

Since SketchUp and many other CAD programs also use OpenGL for this, I believe it should be a fairly simple matter to improve the display.  I think FormZ has tried to remain 'low power' so that even very basic computers can run it.  It would be really nice to have a 'high power' mode that would turn on all the bells and whistles, kind of like how Shaded Full works, but even more so.  

 

In the meantime, you may find that just using Shaded Full with the changed settings, improves the working visibility to a much more desirable level.  

[chrisjk]

I have tried playing around with the settings as you suggest. I prefer Silhouette and Antialias off but the display still doesn't approach Sketchup. I agree that shaded full is quite nice but for constructing things, it renders my machine (iMac 5k core I7 4GHz with 32 GB RAM and 1TB SSD; AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4 GB) a bit too slow and moving stuff around is jerky.

 

Wire frame is no go for construction (for inspecting stuff I really like Sketchup's X-ray mode, much clearer than wireframe for most things).

[Justin Montoya]

Your likely going to have trouble with working with Shaded Full with that lower powered AMD Radeon M395X.  Unfortunately, Apple is not offering very high powered graphics in any of it's products anymore.  Nvidia has much more powerful (and energy efficient!) solutions that are the answer, and unfortunately, for that, you need to move to Windows to use them effectively.  Blame Apple for putting low powered graphics hardware in high priced machines!!