Hi Will - well a 3D manipulator is definitely useful if you want to push and pull a cage of points around in the 3D view. That's really what is was primarily invented to do in those sub-d modeling programs.
But MoI's overall workflow is quite a lot different than those programs. Although it is possible, generally MoI's overall workflow does not involve manipulating a point cage in 3D, so there is just less of an area of work that intersects with that that kind of tool.
NURBS in general has a strong 2D profile curve element to it, so the 2D frame just tends to fit with the workflow that MoI uses a lot better than the 3D "in the middle" style one.
In the future I do want to improve MoI's "point cage" type capabilities though, it just hasn't been a focus initially since it is not one of the stronger areas of NURBS.
One big problem with those other style manipulators is that they just scale things by an arbitrary amount mapping some pixel distance of the mouse to a scale factor. Often times rotation is similar, just an arbitrary angle mapped to some amount of mouse movement. That's fine if you are just trying to mush a bunch of points around because you're sculpting a shape, but not so good if you want to accurately place objects snapped together, like scale something by the exact amount so that it touches another object at a specific location.
I still have not quite completely given up hope on possibly doing a 3D edit frame (like maybe a cube around your selection) which would give the same kind of accuracy as the 2D frame but in the 3D viewport. But so far I have not been able to figure out exactly how to make that work in a nice way yet.
- Michael
|