Hi Danny,

> Will it work in edges only, like text, on the other hand
> if the object your bringing has a lot of edges it might
> still be a problem.

The problem with doing edges only is that it would be different than all the other transform commands.

On a heavy model, drawing the edges actually takes longer than drawing the shaded surface part. Text is kind of a different case, because it has to create the full solid and also mesh it before it could draw the shaded surface. It's due to that creation step being involved that it does wires only in the Text preview.

In MoI v2 there is an optimization that kicks in when you are transforming a model after it gets to a certain number of faces, where it stops drawing the edges and only draws the shaded surfaces for the dynamic mouse feedback, to make for faster feedback.

So doing edges only for the output on a transformation type command is just not a good fit...


> It would be nice maybe when the triad is activate it has
> the traditional, different colour for each axis kind of thing,
> would that make it more distinct

Well, that gets back to the stuff I mentioned a few days ago where I tend to try to minimize the use of colors in the UI in general.

One thing that I don't like about colorizing axis directions is that some people end up strongly associating the colors specifically with the world axis directions, so like if they see a red axis that means "World x axis" to them and can lead to confusion when it is pointing in a different direction (since it is a local axis for some operation) than some other red axis being displayed as the world axis, stuff like that.

There is a big text label that shows up when you mouse over every axis line and the axis line gets a glow around it, and the glow shows up on top of everything. So it's not particularly difficult to figure out what is what after you cruise the mouse over things.

Also colorizing would not do any good if the axis lines were all submerged anyway...


> also the object coming in
> could be the 'locked' color.

That would also be way different than other transform commands. When giving a preview for things, I try when possible to do "What you see is what you get", instead of shifting things suddenly at the end. Like for example if you have a red object and you use the Transform/Copy command (the one like Move not the clipboard one) to make copies of it, you get to see that each object is red when you place it, stuff like that.


So yeah probably some transparency level would be the best way, but that won't be possible until some point in the future.


- Michael