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vectorcraft/docs
Drew Dibble 05fd55bde1 3D effects: every facet's seam has round joins
Each 3D facet is stroked with a narrow seam of its own paint (0.05 to
0.75 pt; Revolve's is always 0.75 pt) so neighboring facets meet without
an antialiasing hairline. In Extrude & Bevel, Inflate and Rotate under a
white light, and in every face of the 3D (Classic) effects (Extrude &
Bevel, Rotate and Revolve (Classic); shaded, No Shading, gradient and
pattern alike), that seam kept the default Miter Join with its limit
of 10. Revolve's seams and the colored-light seams
were already round. A facet seen almost edge-on is a sharp sliver, and
its mitered seam reached up to ten times its half-width past the facet's
tip: thorns of up to 3.75 pt past the solid, along the tops of type seen
tilted and at every edge-on bevel facet.

#2706 (multiple lights) deliberately kept white-light seam joins as they
were, so that legacy white-light output stayed byte-identical to main
(its comment "Preserve existing white-light paints, alpha composition and
seam joins exactly", and four PNGs compared byte for byte). That kept
the thorns too. This change reverses that one part on purpose: the
paints and alpha composition stay exactly as #2706 left them; only the
join changes.

- Outputs change, the document model doesn't. Exports draw the new
  joins (SVG writes stroke-linejoin="round", PDF and .ai draw round
  joins), and Expand Appearance writes round seams into the document.
  But nothing a document stores selects the join, and the format is
  unchanged, so there is no version gate: an old file drawn now simply
  has no thorns.
- Round joins. Projected facets rarely have right-angle corners (a
  square seen at an angle is a parallelogram with acute corners, and an
  exact 90° corner sits at a √2 limit), and round is what the seams of
  colored lights and Revolve already draw. The cost: where a facet has
  no neighbor (Rotate's plane, every silhouette corner) its convex
  corners are drawn rounded by up to 0.375 pt instead of sharp.
  Alternatives weighed and not taken: a Miter Join with a limit near √2
  at every seam, the composed clip included, which would bevel slivers
  but chamfer most projected corners as well; and seaming only the edges
  facets share, or clipping facets to their union as solid_surface
  does, which would keep every outer corner sharp but means a new
  geometry pass for every 3D effect. Round is the smallest change that
  matches the seams already drawn.
- A seam no longer reaches past its facet by more than half its width,
  so the art's visual bounds shrink by up to 3.375 pt where a thorn
  stood (10 × 0.375 less the 0.375 a round seam still reaches).
  White-light output is no longer byte-identical to #2706's comparison;
  docs/3d-lighting-performance.md says so.

Every seam stroke is made by lighting::seam_stroke. The colored clip in
composed_art already outlined its seam with round joins and is
unchanged. Tests: every seam of Extrude & Bevel, Extrude & Bevel (Classic, each
branch), Rotate (Classic), Inflate and Rotate, under white and colored
light, has round joins and reaches no more than half its width past its
face, at views that make a sliver; Revolve (Classic)'s seams are round
on each surface; a mitered seam fails them, and so does the legacy
white-light Inflate test, which now expects Round.
2026-11-12 15:47:18 -07:00
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