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Modeling Menus

   Show Region Direction (command)

Chevrons along each region boundary, showing which way it winds.

Three regions with orange direction marks around their boundaries: a ring whose hole runs the opposite way from its outside, which is what makes it a hole; a plain circle; and a regular pentagon with a mark at the middle of each side.

Menu: View > Show Region Direction | In depth: Regions and booleans

A cycling toggle with three states rather than two, off by default.

A region's boundary has a winding: which way round the loop runs, and so which side of it holds material. It is what a boolean reads to decide what is inside and what is a hole, and it is not something you can see by looking at the shape.

This draws it.

Not the same question as a curve's direction

Show Curve Direction says which way somebody drew a curve. This says which way round a boundary closes. They are separate facts and separate switches, and a region built from curves has both.

So the two can be on at once. The marks are the same glyph and sit on the same boundary, but half a step apart, and they interleave: orange, blue, orange, blue along the line, each still sitting on the thing it describes. Orange is the region, blue is the curve.

The three states

Clicking the menu item cycles through them in this order:

  1. Off. Nothing is drawn.
  2. Selected. Marks on the selection only.
  3. All. Marks on every region.

The menu shows the state with one marker: no tick for off, a dimmed tick for selected, a solid tick for all. It is remembered between sessions.

How many marks a boundary gets

The spacing rule is the same as for curves, roughly every 48 screen pixels, with anything under about 24 pixels on screen left clean until you zoom in.

The cap is different, and much higher: up to 32 marks on a contour, against six on a curve.

A curve is one edge. A region contour is the whole perimeter, wrapping every edge of the shape at once. Six marks is plenty along a single segment and close to useless around a boundary that turns a dozen corners: they land hundreds of pixels apart, and most of the edges carry none at all.

Related

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