Hi Joe, thanks for the feedback on MoI!


> Sometimes in the middle of a movement, say along Z, it may switch for a moment to
> Y, ruining my movement.

For this particular one really the best solution is to rotate your view a bit so that the z line is not too close to the x or y axis on the screen.


> Or because I am not dragging perfectly straight it may slip off of the axis.

For this one, it sounds like you probably want a different setting for how close you have to be for straight snap to be active. To adjust this setting, go to the "Straight Snap" button at the bottom of the screen, and push the little arrow that pops out over top of it, then choose "Straight snap options".

There are 2 settings there - "Activate distance", and "Keep active distance". The first one is the distance in pixels you have to be from a straight snap line for it to initially activate. Once it is active, you only have to remain within the "keep active distance" while you are tracking along it.

Try moving these up to something like Activate: 12, Keep active: 24 and see if that maybe behaves better for you. If that snaps too much for you, maybe try Activate: 6 and Keep Active:24 or 30 - that will keep it the same as the default for the initial activation, but let you be a lot looser for tracking along it once it is active.


> 1) Is there a way to lock object movement to an Axis once MoI has
> guessed correctly and snapped?

For everything except for dragging objects there is a way which is to use a construction line. You get a construction line if you click and drag instead of click and release, when MoI is asking you for a point. For example when you are drawing a line, click and drag instead of click and release - this will create a construction line and once it is defined, the "on" object snap onto the line will have precedence over the straight snap.

However, this is awkward for use during object dragging, because your mouse button is already down when you drag - you can still create a construction line but you have to move your cursor off the viewport to release it, then move back in the view and drag out a line. So that's why I mentioned the other solutions first because those will help you out more for dragging objects as well. I haven't really figured out a very natural way to trigger a construction line for the dragging case yet.


Please let me know if you need any clarification on any of these things.


> 2) Is there a way to force a subcomponent selection type? Sometimes if there are many
> Lines/Curves around a surface I want to select it is hard to select the surface I want.
> Zooming in very close helps, but the process can still be frustrating.

For version 2 I expect to add a selection filter that will let you explicitly control what is being targeted. But this won't be ready for V1.

One trick though is that once you select a certain type of sub-object, like one face, then it will go into a mode where only other faces of that object will be selected and not edges, including with other operations such as area select, select all and invert. So because of this, one way to assist in selecting a difficult face is to first select the largest and most accessible face of your object first, to put it into face mode. Then after you have selected your real intended one, go back and click on that big one to deselect it.

If there is a lot of stuff getting in your way, you can also use hide to temporarily hide edges or faces to help as well.


> 3) Are there any additional selection tools options I may be missing beyond the
> click selection and area selection tools?

Well, there is also Select All, Desl All, and Invert on the Select tab on the side pane.


> For example can I force the area selection to select anything the boundary intersects,
> or only objects it fully encompasses?

This is controlled by the direction that you drag the area window. If you drag from the left to the right, you'll get a solid area rectangle, and only objects fully contained within it will be selected. If you drag from right towards the left, you'll get a dashed rectangle and this will grab anything that intersects it in any way.


> Or are there additional options such as Photoshop's Lasso or Polygonal selection tools?

Nothing for these yet, these are also going to be for a future version.



Re: sweeping around corners - hmm, let me fire it up and take a look at some recommendations for that one. I'll continue on that one shortly.

- Michael