Hi 3dvisuals dude,

One of the differences in approach between MoI and Wings3D kind of gets in the way a bit with this.

Wings controls the amount of an extrusion by just moving the mouse left or right by a bit, mapping a certain number of pixels that your mouse moves to some kind of 3D distance, like say every 10 pixels you move the mouse to the right is one unit of extrusion distance.

MoI doesn't really do any modeling operations with that type of arbitrary mouse waving, instead things in MoI tend to track your mouse directly along 3D lines in the scene. This is to enable more accurate constructions using snapping. For example say you have a vertical cylinder, and a plane like this:



With MoI's extrude mechanism (which tracks along the 3d extrusion line), you can snap the extrusion height to the same height as the cylinder by just moving your mouse to a point on the cylinder, like this:



The wings extrusion method doesn't allow for this kind of tracking and snapping.

But on the other hand, the MoI "track along normal line" method is not really as suited for tracking along simultaneous different normal directions. I haven't really figured out how that should work, that's why it doesn't currently do it. One thing that I was thinking of trying was to show all the normal directions on the screen as dashed lines and then using the one that was closest to the mouse. But that might get messy if there are quite a bunch of lines showing on the screen.

Another possibility would be to just pick a single normal direction, maybe the one from the object that was first selected, and just track along that. That's kind of a more simple thing to set up...

- Michael