The thumbnail-type plane would be kind of different, since those could be infinitely extended planes (like a relocation of the regular grid), while drawing directly on existing objects would probably be limited to the extents of the object... Although maybe you could extend it by dragging a construction line on it.

But the thing is a special kind of thumbnail object would probably mean a fair amount of supplemental UI to manage the list of them, edit them, etc... Stuff that has additional UI to go along with it tends to take me much much longer to implement. I'm very careful about adding UI to try and keep things streamlined.

Drawing directly on planar objects could probably be done without a bunch of extra support UI (maybe just one switch somewhere to enable/disable it) - generally stuff that doesn't need extra UI is much easier for me to jump into sooner.

The way I was kind of thinking of would be that it would only kick in when you drew in the 3D viewport - ortho views would use their current behavior. And maybe a faint grid would show up on the face that your mouse was over top of, so you wouldn't do any special step to activate one, just move over it with your mouse, and if you clicked down on a planar object that would basically become a temporary cplane there.

Maybe the object properties of a plane could include the grid origin for that plane.

I'm not sure yet if it would be able to totally replace cplanes. Maybe though, and if it gave quite a lot of similar functionality with a lot of ease of use, it would probably be a good starting point.


Yup, I've seen ArtRage, it is really cool.

- Michael