Limitations of TempEntities

TempEntities are a powerful, useful, and natively supported tool, very handy when some Entities must be drawn over others as described in this article.

However, they suffer from a number of limitations:

1. They are neither affected by light nor by shadows effects (e.g they are drawn always in displayType.Flat); 
2. The textures are not supported within TempEntitites. (e.g only the base color of the entity is supported, Multicolor mesh will be shown with a single color);
3. They are not customizable (e.g every derived entity will be treated as the default base entity);
4. They need to be regenerated before added to the TempEntities list;
5. Only IFace and ICurve are supported (this excludes BlockReference, Picture, PlanarEntity and PointCloud);
6. Attributes are not supported;
7. They are not selectable;
8. The zoom fit ignores them.
9. When D3D renderer is used the geometry must follow these additional restraints:
   1. Up to 100 000 vertices
   2. Up to 50 000 indices (50 000/3 = 16666 triangles)

Workarounds

Workaround to case 9

A possible solution to overcome the issue 9 of the previous list is to subdivide the Entities before adding it to the TempEntities list, in order to keep each single piece of geometry within the accepted size.