Hi Will,

> As you can see, yes, Lightwave has UI to always display the
> grid size - I don't see anything wrong with that since you can
> change it at dynamically while you're working.

It's just another thing you have to look at and incorporate into your head before you can really understand what scale you are seeing with the current grid.

That's just more complex than the grid staying at a particular value which you have told it to be...


> I typically have the ortho views change together, and the
> perspective view to change independently both in MoI and LW.

Yeah, that is a new setting you can turn on for MoI v2 to keep the ortho views at the same zoom level. But the default is to allow different each view to have an independent zoom.


> The grid UI displays the grid unit size for the currently active view...

I see... But then if you have a split view you have to activate each view in order to know what sized grid you are seeing in each one. That would be possible to have 4 different sized grids displaying on the screen all at the same time.


> Well for me, I think that was actually what I was looking forward
> to - being able to change the grid size without having to stop and
> go into a dialog.

If you want to have a quick grid adjustment without going to a dialog maybe these keyboard shortcuts would be useful:

Increase grid by a factor of 2:
script:moi.grid.size *= 2.0; moi.grid.snapSize = moi.grid.size;

Decrease grid by a factor of 2:
script:moi.grid.size /= 2.0; moi.grid.snapSize = moi.grid.size;


> The one disadvantage I see in MoI currently is that the more
> you zoom out, the grid becomes a useless haze of lines.

Yeah, but it gives you information about what scale you are currently seeing - you know by seeing all those grid lines packed together that your current grid size is a really small value in your current zoom level.

That's the main problem that gets lost with that auto-changing grid method, the grid is no longer a visual indicator of one particular size anymore.


> In LW, the grid is always the same size (and usable for snaps)
> no matter how far in or out you zoom because the grid units
> change to reflect the visible distances;

Well, it stays at the same general visual size exactly because it is not always the same size in units - the unit size is changing all the time...

That's exactly the problem, that it does not always stay the same size in actual model units.


At any rate, each method has some different benefits and problems to it - personally I find that the auto changing method gives more problems than benefits but I can understand that for other people with other ways of working it could be useful.

Eventually I would hope to make an option for that, like I mentioned previously that will take some work to make that happen so it may take a while before I can get to that.

Because it can cause problems, it is just not something that I would really be able to change over completely in MoI to make it only behave that way and not in the current way.

- Michael