I am very excited that with the help of a very talented developer in Germany I am testing the ability to get semi-realtime previews of customizer parameter changes. Here is a video showing how it will work in a test app. Let me know your thoughts:
I do not know what I did wrong, but for me, all it did was buffer.
Model Previews are not live.
Just head over to the site. Select an OpenSCAD model from the MWT or Thingiverse directories and click on the customizer icon. You will see two new options: “Full Preview” and "Simplified Preview ". Most models will preview just fine with the full preview, but since the backend is optimized for speed, it is also limited to 30 seconds. If the preview cannot complete in 30 seconds, you will have the option to generate a simplified preview. For simplified previews, I force the value $fa to 60 and
$fn to 15. Changing these special OpenSCAD quality variables significantly reduces the time to generate a PNG file.
Like the rendering queue, the previews use the actual OpenSCAD image with output set to PNG.
When viewing a preview, you have options to rotate or flip the image, and zoom will be available in future releases.
As always, let me know what you think.