Frost evaluates while hidden

[paul]

There are two common reasons for Frost to update:

1. For the display. In this case, there’s no reason to update when hidden.
2. It’s evaluated as an input to something else. For example, using a PRT Volume to fill a Frost mesh with particles. In this case, Frost should update whether it’s hidden or not.

It seems that 3ds Max’s behavior changed in a recent update, so 3ds Max itself now evaluates the Frost object even when it’s hidden. I can’t see any way to distinguish this from case 2 above.

I will keep looking into the problem, but I suspect we will need to make some user interface change as a workaround. Here are a few ideas. I’m not really happy with any of them:

1. The built-in way to deal with this is to turn off “Enable in Viewport” instead of hiding the Frost mesh. I know this is less convenient. Is there anything we could do to make this easier to use?
2. Add an option to “Evaluate while hidden”?
3. When you press Esc to cancel, disable viewport meshing until you explicitly enable it?

Do you have any suggestions?

[benyaboy]

Do you guys have an ADN membership with autodesk? They should be able to anser this question. (they are shifting their site to salesforce.com so it might get better or worse).

Ben.

[JohnnyRandom]

Enable In Viewport = Off should still evaluate IMO because you want it to work you just don’t want it to see it. Isn’t this is how PRT Objects work?

My method of thought is (whether anyone agrees with me well… ): I usually use Display as Box as my “I want to use you but not see you” and I reserve Hidden as a complete disregard without actually deleting the object mode. This works pretty well in in heavy scenes.

To me Hidden is and should be out-of-sight out-of-mind.