"Hi Danny, it is possible but it has a couple of problems...

One problem is that it would mean storing additional orientation information along with each object. It's not much more information for a solid, but for a simple object like a line it kind of bloats up the stored information by a fair amount."


Wouldn't this be solved by simply adding a mode to arbitrarily ORIENT (rotate) the manipulator?

This way he could say dbl-click the manipulator (which puts it into "orient" mode), then rotate it until it matches the orientation of the cylinder he's working on, (I guess dbl-click it again to exit mode) and then perform his 1-D scale...

Granted if the "orient mode" is limited to just rotating the widget, then that last dbl-click to exit wouldn't be necessary - just start dragging and the orient mode is automatically exited.

No extra data per object needed.

Seems like a handy feature for scaling any object. :-)

-Will