Hello Michael,

>One thing that I don't quite follow is the position part.

>>A general object doesn't particularly have a single special "position" point on it... Like for example what would you say is >>the position of this object:

Well of course you've picked the one object where having this info doesn't help much :-)


My thoughts on this come from using software that has propeties panels like CoreDraw a lot. In CorelDraw there is a properties panel that let's you both see and change parameters for whatever object is selected. It has size, position, scale, and various other parameters that change depending on the selection.

I use it for accurate placement and visually checking of construction lines, text, boxes and circles/ellipses. So I quickly drag a construction line onto the page which puts it at say -39.3897 mm. then type 40 in the x position box and it will move to exactly x= 40 mm.

Create a box at x 30, y 50 (centre) then I can move it 10 to the right by typing 40 in the x coord field. Easy, quick and accurate without eyeballing it, or counting the grid squares or finding out later that I overshot slightly on my grid that was set up for 0.25 mm on the last drawing ;-)


Before the properties panel was introduced I used grids, construction lines or sometimes even drew another item and used that. Now I use the properties panel almost exclusively to do this kind of manipulation.

If I can't see the position or size then I can't act upon them. And is best if I can type the desired value right there in the field.


Carrara has a similar properties panel but in 3 dimensions, it also includes seperate fields for the hot point. This is very useful when placing objects in relation to other ones. I use it quite a bit to check placement of trees on the ground for example.

Also check out Silo 2 for a similar thing - they call it the numerical editor but it does the same job and includes position, rotation, scale, and size.

Modo has an editable properties panel for position, rotation and scale but not for size. I wish it did have size and it is an often requested feature on the Luxology forums to be able to define the size of an item in the propeties panel as well as the other parameters.


IMHO it makes positioning and re-sizing objects faster and more accurate that dragging with the mouse/pen. Or one can use a combination depending on the situation.

MoI didn't have this facility and I missed it. But it was a V1 and there was more to come. When you talked about properties I was very pleased that this was coming but it is not what I expected :-(


I hope this explains better where I'm coming from on this subject.