The Preferences panel (Info > Preferences command) lets you modify default values of various optional settings. Once opened, it displays three tabs: General, Units, and View.
General
Autosave allows you to automatically save the current scene every "n" minutes. To enable this option, switch on the Enable check button and set the minutes value in the proper data field.
If you check Safe save on, every time you save a previously named scene, a decision box will ask you if you are sure to save. This option is useful to avoid accidental savings.
Switch the Large buttons off if you want icons of half the default size.
The Texture folder section allows you to choose which folder should be set as the default resource for textures.
Renderings buffer refers to the maximum number of rendered pictures that will be displayed in the Rendering browser and stored in the /sThinking/Images folder.
Undo buffer lets you set the amount of memory solidThinking uses to save 'undo' information. Simple commands take less memory; thus, more simple commands can be undone. As complexity increases, fewer commands will be retained in memory.
Units
The Modeling precision section can be used to set the NURBS Surface modeling tolerance. Such tolerance, expressed in the current units, is used by the modeling tools that cannot produce an exact result, such as pipe, birail, trim, intersect, blend, round, and surface tangency align.
This ensures that surfaces you create do not deviate from the theoretical result more than the specified tolerance. The lower the tolerance, the higher the precision but also the slower the computation. The 0.001 default value should be appropriate for most cases.
Changing this value with an open scene will cause all the Construction Tree to be re-evaluated in order to fit the new tolerance value.
The Units section allows you to specify the units of the scene. solidThinking allows you to choose among various standard units (Standard Units) as well as to specify your own unit (Custom Units).
View
The Fast Redraw check box is automatically disabled if engine and graphic board do not support such mode.
The Grids in ortho views and Grids in 3D views check boxes can be switched off in case you want that grids in the orthographic and/or perspective views are not displayed.
The Adaptive degradation option allows you to specify a minimum number of frames per second during camera movement. When the model is so complex that it could cause the rate to drop below the specified level, the model will be redrawn in a simplified manner. This includes wireframe and bounding box. Set the value to 0 to disable the option.
The Visualization engine section lets you choose between OpenGL and Direct3D.
At start up, solidThinking detects if DirectX is installed and if hardware acceleration is supported. DirectX will only be used under these two conditions. The DirectX option is only available on Windows 95 and 98. It is possible to force solidThinking to start with OpenGL or DirectX by holding down the Shift or Ctrl key respectively during the program start up. This setting will be definitive for all successive sections.
In order to exploit hardware texture mapping of accelerated graphic cards, it is possible to specify the internal format of the Textures. Three formats are supported: RGBA, RGB, and BGR. If your system mounts an accelerated graphic board you may want to verify which format is better supported. This option is effective only with OpenGL.
Internal size specifies the dimension of the textures used by the visualization engine. The higher the values, the slower will be the redrawing.
Quality allows you to specify additional settings regarding texture mapping. The Anti-aliasing option forces the texture to be drawn anti-aliased. This ensures a better quality in texture mapped visualization mode. On the other side, if the graphic board does not support hardware anti-aliasing this may produce a slower redraw.
Entry-level graphic boards usually perform texture mapping without taking in consideration the perspective deformation of the texture over the polygons. This may deform the texture over a surface. This effect is more evident when the polygons are relatively large. Switch Force perspective correction on to avoid this problem. Use this option only if actually needed, as it will generally slow down redrawing.