Feature Comparison

The following table gives comparisons among more prominent features between Helix 3D and Bloodstone viewers. There may be more functionalities provided by Helix 3D but here we only outline those that are more user facing.

Feature Name	Helix 3D	Bloodstone
Zoom to fit	Yes	Yes
Zoom with mouse	Yes	Yes
Pan	Yes	Yes
Rotate	Yes	Yes
Off-centered rotation	No	Yes
Grid lines	Yes	No
UCS icon	Yes	No
Text support	Yes	No
Selection highlight	Deferred	Real-time
Phong shading	Yes	Yes
Phong shading light sources	3	1
Flat shading	No	Yes
Per-vertex color	No	Yes
Per-node color	No	Yes
Anti-aliasing	Yes	Yes

Prioritized Task List

The following list represents what are to be implemented in Bloodstone for it to reach feature parity with that of Helix 3D viewer. These tasks are not exhaustive and will grow as demanded:

• Implement pan operation
• Implement zoom operation
• Implement zoom extent with double-click
• Replace IGraphicsContext::ActivateShaderProgram with IShaderProgram::Activate
• Replace IGraphicsContext::RenderVertexBuffer with IVertexBuffer::Render
• Encapsulate things like controlParams in impl-specific classes
• Remove APIs to deal with vertex/fragment shader from IGraphicsContext
• Remove alpha uniform from Phong fragment shader
• Introduce a notion of "inactive" shader program (those that fail compilation)
• Set the background Cornflower blue to match the geometry contents
• Output diagnostic information on Dynamo
• Fix creation failure for Parallels
• Only zoom-to-fit when geometries arrive for the first time
• Make Z-axis as up vector instead of Y-axis
• Align view operations with that of Revit (i.e. mouse actions etc.)
• Integrate zoom operation with mouse wheel
• Performance: Merge the two-pass conversion from IRenderPackage to VB
• Update Phong shader to include 3 light sources, and increase the saturation
• Perform proper OpenGL context creation
• Implement anti-aliasing for better visual quality
• Implement geometry clearing when document is opened/closed/created
• Implement geometry clearing when nodes are deleted

Screenshots

Stadium designed by @elayabharath

Another stadium designed by @elayabharath

The graphics system always chooses the best anti-aliasing mode if the hardware allows it. If the default of 8x MSAA fails, the graphics context will fall back to 4x MSAA (or no anti-aliasing if even that fails). The following image makes the comparison among these settings (click on the image to display the original size for better comparisons):

Color setting is now available on per-node basis

Colored spheres in a grid

Render style settings on a per-node basis, with default set to Phong Shading

Render style of Primitive Color allows color specified on triangles to show through without shading