What if you want to draw or construct on a curved surface though? Like I draw some curves, project them onto the surface, and then use them to 'cut' detail into the surface. This kind of feature would be awesome for mechanical modeling for tanks/ships/etc.

A construction plane that can easily be built 'tangent' to a surface would be awesome, it's Z axis would of course be the surface normal.

It would be cool if we could 'tack' a plane to the surface, and then recall it as suggested, like a bookmark.

But being able to 'draw' on any flat surface would be a killer shortcut too.

Hi Crusoe, drawing on a curved surface would definitely be cool as well, but there are some things that make it more difficult to achieve.

First of all, it would require changes to every drawing command. For planar surfaces only, I think there is a good possibility of being able to implement that without needing to change the drawing commands individually, that makes it a lot easier for me to attempt as a first step.

There is also some ambiguity about how different people might expect drawing on a surface to work.

If it locked to a surface normal plane on the first click, that seems like it would be pretty good for some drawing tools like a circle, but at the same time that would cause difficulties with other drawing tools like curve. Like for example if you wanted to draw a curve that followed around the outside of a cylinder (rotating around the cylinder while continuing to draw), that would not really be possible if you were in effect working on a plane normal through the initial point...

Another possibility is to put the drawn shapes in the UV space of the surface, but that has some strange side effects of its own...

There are just a lot more issues to work through for curved surface drawing, that's why it is probably a lot more feasible for me to focus on drawing on planes at first.

- Michael

I just want a drawing plane that I can draw on, and then project the curve onto a object if I so chose.

Kinda how PROJECT already works, only it allows X-Y-Z plane drawings to be projected.

I just want a arbitrary construction plane. Once I have that, I can draw on there and then project it as needed. I'm not asking for full blown realtime curved surface drawing.

So arbitrary construction plane, with some easy way to create one tangential to a surface, and have projection work with that.