Hey folks, you may have seen the realtime preview...preview. There is a specific challenge here that we want your feedback on. Please keep this discussion to the issue shown below:
The problem by example
You're making a fillet. You are used to seeing Edge<3> in the geometry input box of the fillet dialog when you click Edge<3>. This is fine when the feature hasn't been evaluated. However, realtime previews actually evaluate the feature and the <3> becomes potentially meaningless quickly. That edge you picked doesn't technically exist anymore because geometry has been changed. A new edge may now be Edge<3>. Situations can arise where the <3> you picked is actually now <4>, or there could even be duplicate <3>s. None of this is relevant to the final state of the model; it is only potentially confusing while you have the dialog up. It is simply a byproduct of showing the "before state" of the inputs and the "after state" on the canvas.
Our assumption on a fix - the part we need feedback on
There is not a ton of value in showing the identifiers at all in feature dialogs. In fact, many other softwares do not. They might show "5 edges selected" instead of listing each out with an identifier. Our assumption is that removing identifiers in feature dialogs entirely will have no side effects because:
Our proposed solution is to remove <#> identifiers from feature dialogs.
The problem by example
You're making a fillet. You are used to seeing Edge<3> in the geometry input box of the fillet dialog when you click Edge<3>. This is fine when the feature hasn't been evaluated. However, realtime previews actually evaluate the feature and the <3> becomes potentially meaningless quickly. That edge you picked doesn't technically exist anymore because geometry has been changed. A new edge may now be Edge<3>. Situations can arise where the <3> you picked is actually now <4>, or there could even be duplicate <3>s. None of this is relevant to the final state of the model; it is only potentially confusing while you have the dialog up. It is simply a byproduct of showing the "before state" of the inputs and the "after state" on the canvas.
Our assumption on a fix - the part we need feedback on
There is not a ton of value in showing the identifiers at all in feature dialogs. In fact, many other softwares do not. They might show "5 edges selected" instead of listing each out with an identifier. Our assumption is that removing identifiers in feature dialogs entirely will have no side effects because:
- If for some reason you need an identifier, for example because you are making a script, you can still easily find that information by just clicking on an object and looking at the bottom right of the screen.
- It is not easy to correlate any particular value in a multi-input box with geometry on screen using the <#> identifier. It basically provides almost no value during selection.
Our proposed solution is to remove <#> identifiers from feature dialogs.