I've still got quite a bit of work left to finish it up, but I think I've got a pretty coherent plan forming up for how the object properties stuff can work.

The current concept is to have a panel that shows up in the upper-right corner of the window when you are in selection mode before running a command. This is the same area that is used for command options while you are inside of a command, previously this area was just blank when you are in selection mode.

The panel will appear when you select objects, it will show you and allow you to edit properties of that object.

Here's what I have arrived at so far:




And with labels so I can refer to some different parts:




#1 is the name assigned to the current object, or "Unnamed" if there is no name assigned.

If you move your mouse over that top row, it will sort of highlight:



And if you click on it, a small dialog box will pop up that will allow you to set the name:




If the name gets pretty long it will wrap to multiple lines in the properties panel:




#2 to the right of the name on the same line, is the object type readout. This will give a very short description of what type of object is currently selected, something like one of: "Curve", "Closed Crv", "Edge", "Surface", "Joined Srf", or "Solid".

The good part of this is that you can just glance over here to find out some things, like if you have a curve selected or an edge, whether your selected curve is closed or not, and whether your model is a fully closed solid or not.


#3 & #4 - this line shows the current style assigned to the object. #3 is the name of the style, and #4 is a swatch to show the style visually. When you move your mouse over this line, it will highlight same as the name above, and then when you click you will get a dropdown or dialog that will allow you to choose between some predefined styles, and have a menu item to go to a "style manager" to edit styles or set up new styles.

A style will be a bundled set of properties such as color, line style, render attributes, etc... probably this will start out just with color for now. I was previously going to put in a bunch of individual controls for different properties all directly on the properties panel, but I think it will be better overall to focus more on the concept of setting a style that is a bundle of things since that will map more easily to a material library kind of thing.


Then #5 Tools will drop out a big menu, probably with just lines of text on it instead of icons and it will have a whole bunch of somewhat more "advanced" tools on it that can be applied to the selected object. I think this menu will be where I'll be able to add many commands such as Rebuild, Simplify lines & arcs, etc... This one probably won't be ready for a while longer.


#6 Details will open up a big dialog box that has a much more detailed information about the selected object, and also incorporate some editing tools as well. For example with a circle it would list the center of the circle and its radius and let you change those values. I'm also thinking of possibly putting things like Mass properties / length / area / volume, on this dialog instead of as individual commands.


Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!

This is still all a work in progress, but it seems like it is coming together well, the next big part is drilling into getting the styles stuff more clearly planned.

- Michael