Hi Fredrik, one other idea is to maybe just allow drawing on any plane object in the model, like the side of a box, etc...

Yes, I like that idea. Universal ways of doing thingis are good, they make learning quicker. Like Lego was in the old days before all the "special parts you can only use for one thing" came. (Lego iss still the best)
Mabe the thumbnail stuff could be an option if you need to place a plane on a double curved thing.

Do you know the program Artrage (www.artrage.com)? It has some nice interface tings.

-Fredrik

The thumbnail-type plane would be kind of different, since those could be infinitely extended planes (like a relocation of the regular grid), while drawing directly on existing objects would probably be limited to the extents of the object... Although maybe you could extend it by dragging a construction line on it.

But the thing is a special kind of thumbnail object would probably mean a fair amount of supplemental UI to manage the list of them, edit them, etc... Stuff that has additional UI to go along with it tends to take me much much longer to implement. I'm very careful about adding UI to try and keep things streamlined.

Drawing directly on planar objects could probably be done without a bunch of extra support UI (maybe just one switch somewhere to enable/disable it) - generally stuff that doesn't need extra UI is much easier for me to jump into sooner.

The way I was kind of thinking of would be that it would only kick in when you drew in the 3D viewport - ortho views would use their current behavior. And maybe a faint grid would show up on the face that your mouse was over top of, so you wouldn't do any special step to activate one, just move over it with your mouse, and if you clicked down on a planar object that would basically become a temporary cplane there.

Maybe the object properties of a plane could include the grid origin for that plane.

I'm not sure yet if it would be able to totally replace cplanes. Maybe though, and if it gave quite a lot of similar functionality with a lot of ease of use, it would probably be a good starting point.


Yup, I've seen ArtRage, it is really cool.

- Michael

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.