Every time I want to edit points now, I see a bunch of light blue spots the size of a pea and can't get rid of them. Searched in prefs and display options but nothing on the horizon to turn them off.

I don't understand why this - spots on top of points and thick lines on top of edges - was introduced on top of the normal display/edge display. It brings nothing to the table, other than making incredibly difficult to see what's going on when having points and edge close together.

Am I the only one bothered by this?

I don't understand that either.
It is so obvious, that most houdini users and developers are not used to handle complex and dense meshes in the viewport.
There are accepted and more importantly production proved methods for all the basic display, object and component handling all around.
What we see here is what most developers did in the 80s: be different as much as possible. But eventually they all came to the same conclusions. There is no need to reinvent the wheel or invent new ways of displaying things. There is nothing wrong with just doing the what has been proven to be practical and useful.

OneBigTree
It is so obvious, that most houdini users and developers are not used to handle complex and dense meshes in the viewport.

Amen to that. I was so itchy to say that, but then I thought I'd be met again with comments like “we don't need that kind of feedback, only constructive criticism” (which is to some degree true). I'm glad you told it for me.

Just to be clear: we're not talking about dense meshes full-stop. Clearly lots of work done in Houdini involve very dense meshes, but we're talking about dense meshes (like models - characters) that are hand created and edited inside H.

OneBigTree
There are accepted and more importantly production proved methods for all the basic display, object and component handling all around.

Very true.

OneBigTree
What we see here is what most developers did in the 80s: be different as much as possible. But eventually they all came to the same conclusions. There is no need to reinvent the wheel or invent new ways of displaying things. There is nothing wrong with just doing the what has been proven to be practical and useful.

I don't quite agree with you here. I don't think the devs. do what they do for the sake of being different. I believe they base their decisions on the genuine conviction that it's the right thing to do and they proved this many times by backing up and undo things that we voiced our concerns over.
Probably like you, I just wish they could read our minds and eliminate the guess work from the get go

Here I've imported an object (hard surface) of mine. Can someone see what I've selected there?
This is far from the most dense/complex meshes one can deal with when modeling.

McNistor
I don't quite agree with you here. I don't think the devs. do what they do for the sake of being different. I believe they base their decisions on the genuine conviction that it's the right thing to do and they proved this many times by backing up and undo things that we voiced our concerns over.

Those things are not mutually exclusive

As for the feedback: To my experience people fear criticism because they fear change if you're being constructive or not. Only if your not constructive it gives them an argument

Anyway, I'm still very happy with the new release but a lot of things are in there because of criticism. So I see no point in shutting up.

@McNistor
what kind of graphics card do you have and what kind of monitor?
this is what I see, edge loop on a default torus
linux
GeForce GTX 980 (352.21.0.0)

But you're not in tweak mode.

OneBigTree
Those things are not mutually exclusive

As for the feedback: To my experience people fear criticism because they fear change if you're being constructive or not. Only if your not constructive it gives them an argument

Yeah, you're probably right - anyway, here's another not very complicated thing to solve (I'm guessing) but important for a modeler (IMO):
currently when in edit (or as of recently ‘tweak’) mode, you only see the points you selected to transform. The only way to see the other is to override the viewport options with the side button “display points” but that makes points visible in every other mode - edge and poly - when you'll have to toggle off the point display again. That's bound to get old quickly.

I've been raging for quite some time now (along with a RFE to which I got a rather, let's say not constructive response) - what we need is a button that activates point display for point mode only.
I don't get how a modeler can edit an object while in point mode and not care about seeing the other (unselected) points?!

@arctor what OneBigTree said.

ooops

But it looks cool with one isolated edge loop doesn't it?

I agree, selecting multiple edges, especially when they are close together, can cause the visualization to become less than clear.

An immediate fix for the point display issue is to change the ‘point marker size’ in the display settings ( d in the viewport ) under ‘guides’. This is less than ideal, but it will at least help alleviate some of the pain.

Additionally, to reduce the overlap of edge highlights, you can go into the display settings and reduce the ‘wire width’ parameter under ‘Geometry’. If the lines become too difficult to see, raie the ‘wire blend’ parameter.

Wire width of 0.1 and wire blend of 0.8 seemed to do the trick for me.

Neither are of these are ideal solutions to your problem, but should at least help for the moment.

McNistor
But it looks cool with one isolated edge loop doesn't it?

Yeah, it's showing the cook/node selection, which, after enabling selection memory, I had to put back in there somehow, because “workflow” (sigh).

I'll make sure it gets not drawn when in the edit state.

That's the “Highlight” flag. After you've made a selection in the viewport, go to the Edit SOP in the network view, and from the RMB menu choose “Flags -> Highlight”. This will turn off the highlight flag for the Edit SOP, and the glowing around the selection will go away. The highlight flag on a SOP tells the viewport to visually show (with the glow) what parts of the geometry are being operated on by the SOP. Really useful for the Group SOP. Obviously less useful when you working on an Edit SOP.

Sadly, even if you turn off this flag on the edit SOP, when you make a new selection, it gets turned back on. So this isn't a solution, just explaining the source of the problem. The glow was not introduced in an attempt to make the tweak tool better (or to be different, or really to affect the tweak tool in any way). It was an attempt to make the Group SOP better that leaked onto the Edit SOP. I'll submit a bug and hopefully it can be addressed in an upcoming H15 daily build.

All feedback is good feedback. Don't worry about constructive vs non-constructive.

Thanks!

@halfdan What did you have to put back in there after enabling selection memory? I don't think I understand what you mean.

edit: ah, you were probably referring to what Mark said.

@mtucker Thanks for the explanation. It's a bummer that things have a wicked way of rolling out sometimes, otherwise I would've happily spared everyone the fuss about this.