Hi Tim, thanks for the feedback!

> In 3D could we have rotate about mouse pointer rather than 0,0
> which wizzes things off screen when zoomed in.

This one would maybe be a bit difficult. The rotation point needs to be a 3d point in x,y,z space. Your mouse pointer is normally only a 2d location on the screen. There are different ways that can be used to calculate a 3d point from the 2d mouse cursor location, such as intersecting it with the grid or snapping on to a nearby object, but these normally happen during drawing commands where you have a lot of feedback for where that point is while you move the mouse around. For rotation this wouldn't happen, it would need to suddenly generate that 3d point without doing a bunch of tracking around of it beforehand. This would probably be somewhat confusing and hard to control.

The rotation center point doesn't have to be 0,0,0 - that's just what it starts out to be.

The easiest way to change it is to select some objects and use the "Reset" button that appears on the panel at the bottom of a viewport. This will zoom to fit the selected objects to the screen, and it will also place the rotation pivot point at the center of the selected objects.

So after a "Reset", you should be able to easily rotate around the selected objects without going off into space somewhere else.

The other method is you can use the "Area" zoom on that bottom panel as well - that lets you pick a point and drag a zoom box around it. The point that you pick can be snapped on to any point you want, and that point will become the new rotation pivot. So if you want to focus in on the corner of a box for example, do a zoom area and snap the center point to the corner of the box and drag a rectangle around it a little bit. Now when you rotate you will pivot around that box corner.


> Could we have a buttton that centres a new object on 0,0 I know we ought
> to do it right but I don't always.

If you need to center it later on, try the Transform / Align tool. You can use 2 applications of that and switch between horizontal and vertical centering and snap the target point on to the origin and that should do it.

If you can identify a center point of the object to grab, you can also just drag it to the origin and it will snap there, make sure you have Object Snap enabled, it should be highlighted in orange on the bottom bar. Sometimes the Transform/Move command can give you a little more control than dragging since it allows you to more explicitly pick the base point.

But the best way is to just draw the object centered from the very beginning!


> I keep going back and forth between Construct and Transform, I notice that there
> is a bit of room at the bottom of that section, any chance of having them both
> on screen at once?

I want to reserve that area for some future expansion.

Which Transform commands do you find yourself using the most often? I have some ideas that I want to try for version 2.0 that should make it easier to do some types of transforms without needing to go over there.

If you are frequently using a particular transform, it might help to set up a keyboard shortcut for it. Let me know if you want some help setting this up.


> For us jewellers Grid Snap is a boon, but when you get down small
> (1/10mm) you have to switch it off, I know someone suggested that a
> 1/10mm grid appear when you zoom up large , perhaps a flagged
> reminder on screen that this has happened?

I'm kind of wary about automatic changes to the grid, even with flagged reminders. It's kind of dangerous in a certain way because normally the grid gives you a distinct sense of the scale you are working on and lets you guarantee point placement at specific values, but if it changes just in response to view manipulations, you no longer have those guarantees.

One thing that you might find useful is a keyboard shortcut that would step the grid spacing up or down on a keystroke. Paul has a script for that here: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=509.1

Also Petr has collected some other useful scripts here: http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/

Let me know if you need any help setting these scripts up.


> If I create a solid inside another but with a surface level with another , I find the
> smaller one hard to select, how should I do this?

Probably the easiest way is to hide the larger one.

Another way is to use the area select - this is the rectangle that you can use for selection when you click and drag in an empty area. If you drag starting from the right side and moving towards the left, you will get a dashed rectangle and anything that intersects the rectangle in any way will get selected. if you drag from the left going towards the right, you will get a solid rectangle and only things that are completely contained inside of it will get selected. You can use this "complete containment only" mode to capture a smaller object if you drag a rectangle that only contains it and not the larger object.

You can also sometimes use Select / Invert to help get a selection onto a difficult object as well - select everything else and then do Select / Invert and it will flip the selection.

- Michael