> Sounds like you're having fun!

I am! Unfortunately I couldn't stop thinking about the mirroring idea and didn't get much sleep... :)

More on that later today, but I think with that in place there is going to be quite a lot of great functionality built into this streamlined editing frame.

- Michael

I know how it is, I was up to 3a last nite working on some code myself ;-)

Sounds like it's going to be a really nice addition to MOI - I can't wait to give the new widget a try when its ready!

-Will

Ok, I've got the switching between scale-from-center or scale-from-corner working.

The way it works is like this - when you move over a corner grip, an origin point will then pop up showing you where the scale will be centered around if you drag:



If you click the corner handle instead of dragging it, it will flip the scaling origin from the center to the opposite corner:



Each click (instead of drag) on a corner handle will flip it between those 2 scaling styles.

- Michael

Hi Michael, pretty nice features there, except I think that the pivot shouldn't look like regular point object. -Petr

Hi Petr,

> Hi Michael, pretty nice features there, except I think that
> the pivot shouldn't look like regular point object. -Petr

Any suggestions on what it should look like instead?

- Michael

Something like circle with cross mark inside it or two concentric circles? Or a red glow around point?

Ok, here's the idea on the mirroring.

So Petr, I was not really sure about even doing the freeform mirroring because it just does not seem all that useful to get something that is both mirrored and squished by some kind of arbitrary amount. I mean it seems useful to be able to do some arbitrary squishing by itself, and some exact mirroring by itself, but mirrored + arbitrary squished together? Not exactly a high use thing.

But it was pretty easy to add so I put that in there, and messing with it got me thinking, what about an option to do some exact mirroring instead of squished mirroring... That would be really cool because that is another one of the frequently used transformations.

So what I was thinking was I could put a snap point on the opposite side of the corner that you dragged on, at an equal distance of the width of the bounding frame. Like this:



So the idea is that if you grab a frame corner and drag it all the way over to the other side where that red dot on the left is, that will snap on to that point and perform a precise mirror just like doing the mirror command with the y axis there as the mirror line (including making a copy of the object).

That would mean that after you drew a symmetrical profile about a world axis, you could create a mirrored copy by using the editing frame without having to fire up the mirror command for that - the frame would then handle basic rotation, scaling, and axis-aligned mirroring all together.

I'll be messing around with this tomorrow to see how it feels. The other idea is maybe to have no squished mirroring at all, and just do this exact mirror if you move any distance over to that side instead of just getting near that snap point...

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>>but mirrored + arbitrary squished together?

Aha... I didn't realize that contrary to background image the object is getting squished as you move a cursor towards the opposite frame corner.


>>So what I was thinking was I could put a snap point on the opposite side of
>>the corner that you dragged on, at an equal distance of the width of the bounding frame.

I think I am not completely clear about this part.
Do you mean the width of the bounding box of frame (distance between grips) or object's bounding box or distance between grip and world Y axis?

Will a position of the pivot point (both scale and rotate pivot) impact on mirroring itself?

Will we be able to identify/change the location of a mirror axis? Your illustration includes some point, does the mirror axis (parallel to y axis) pass through that point at the end of a curve or is there just hard-coded Y-world mirror axis?



Another question. Is a rotate icon always on the top side of the frame?
In other words, when I rotate the object using the editing frame, deselect it and re-select the same object, does the original frame or new one with the rotate icon on the top appear?

Petr

Hi Petr,

> Aha... I didn't realize that contrary to background image the
> object is getting squished as you move a cursor towards the
> opposite frame corner.

Well, it is different than the background image if you track along a horizontal line while going over, that will do the 1D non-proportional scale in this case which images don't do.

But really I meant any kind of scaling at all. It would be kind of frustrating if you could get a mirrored and arbitrarily scaled object by dragging over there, but not get a mirrored object of the same size, actually though that seems to be the standard behavior in 2D illustration programs that do allow dragging to the opposite side.


> I think I am not completely clear about this part.
> Do you mean the width of the bounding box of frame (distance
> between grips) or object's bounding box or distance between
> grip and world Y axis?

I mean width of the object's bounding box. In the example I showed the edge of the bounding box happened to be on the world Y axis, so that's all I meant by referring to the Y axis specifically there.


> Will a position of the pivot point (both scale and rotate pivot)
> impact on mirroring itself?

Not for the one that I showed in that previous picture. I would plan to have that available in the same spot and behavior regardless of pivot mode/placement.

However, if you have scale-from-center turned on, I was thinking about having other snap points in the other frame corners so that you could do an exact "in place" mirror (around the center point) by targeting those points.


> Will we be able to identify/change the location of a mirror axis?

Well, it will always be the 2 bounding box edges opposite of the corner that you choose. So the choice of which corner you drag will let you pick between those edges, but there won't be any way to set it to some arbitrary line elsewhere, for that you'll still need to use the regular Mirror command.


> Your illustration includes some point, does the mirror axis (parallel
> to y axis) pass through that point at the end of a curve or is there
> just hard-coded Y-world mirror axis?

The mirror axis will always be the edge of the bounding box, but of course when you have an endpoint of a curve sticking out to one side, then that end will be on the bounding box edge.


> Another question. Is a rotate icon always on the top side of the frame?
> In other words, when I rotate the object using the editing frame, deselect
> it and re-select the same object, does the original frame or new one with
> the rotate icon on the top appear?

If you grab it and rotate it, it will then spin around to some other location, but if you unselect and then reselect, then the whole frame will get reset on the new selection and the rotate grip will be back at the top of the axis aligned frame again.

In order to keep the rotation between selections, I would have to maintain some additional persistent state associated with objects... It could be possible to do that, but it brings up a bunch of issues.

It seems to be pretty common for 2D illustration programs to reset the frame like this, like for example Xara does it after every rotation even if you don't change the selection. Adobe Illustrator seems to try to maintain the frame orientation if you have things like a bunch of rectangles all at the same angle selected, but it too will reset it to world-aligned after every rotation if you have like 2 rectangles at different angles selected at once.

- Michael

Hi Petr,

> Something like circle with cross mark inside it or two concentric
> circles? Or a red glow around point?

How about this:



- Michael

Hmmmm....It should go together with a look of grips and rotate icon and reflect that this mark is a center point of rotation as well as a base point for the scale. My original suggestion doesn't seems to fit for representing the base point of scaling.
And what about a small square with cross inside like window manager's close button?

Petr

Hi Michael,
a while back I came across this, on the topic of a "3D Gizmo", and noticing the current thread I thought you'd enjoy knowing about it, and possibly comparing it to what's ahead in v2's plans.

The first link is there simply as general FYI; please, take special note on the second, at the bottom portion of the page under the heading "Publications", there's a reference to the Kite Geometry Manipulator:

http://www.ds.arch.tue.nl/Research/Projects/E3DAD/
http://www.win.tue.nl/~spranovi/research.htm

Cheers,

- Diego -

The Kite looks half way to being like the Carrara/Hexagon maipulator!
(I had to say that!)
Brian

> Hmmmm....It should go together with a look of grips and rotate
> icon and reflect that this mark is a center point of rotation as
> well as a base point for the scale.

Yeah, that is a good idea that it should match the other grips, especially since you'll be able to grab it in one case for moving the rotation center.

How about this:

Hi Michael,

Yes, it looks fine. Perhaps, the pivot icon size could be decreased slightly...

I have also noticed that the base point for scaling is a corner of object's bounding box (or center point). Does it mean that when you drag a grip and want to use a "snap to grid" feature, then the snap action actually occurs under an imaginary point (corner of bounding box adjacent to the dragged grip) and not under the grip?

Petr

Hi Petr,

> Perhaps, the pivot icon size could be decreased slightly...

Yup, probably will feel a bit less clunky that way. How about this:



I've gotten more used to the slight smaller corner icons too, I think I will keep those but have the original slightly larger one for the highlighted state.


> Does it mean that when you drag a grip and want to use a "snap to grid"
> feature, then the snap action actually occurs under an imaginary point
> (corner of bounding box adjacent to the dragged grip) and not under
> the grip?

Yup, the grip is actually slightly to the outside of the actual point that you place when you drag it.

Dragging it is not so much actually placing the corner as it is placing the edge of the new bounding box, since it does a uniform scale (this is the same way that images work in 1.0).

- Michael

Hi Michael,

For the pivot point indicator, how about the following - modeled in MoI, of course :-)

A small, white icon that shows where the point is and what it does at the same time...

Hi Satoribomb, that looks pretty good, thanks! I'm not quite on rotation yet, but I'll take a look at that when I get there.

- Michael

Ok, I got mirroring working. Here's an example.

Starting with moving the mouse over this corner:



If you click down and start to drag, a little target marker will appear on the opposite side of the shape, shown with the red arrow here:



If you move your mouse over to that opposite side point, it will snap on and do a mirror just as if you had run the mirror command along the edge of the object's bounding box:



So it will be possible to do simple scaling, rotation, and now also mirroring by using the frame grips instead of firing up the full transform commands for those.




Also I've set it up so that holding down shift will do a 2D transform on a 3D volume object, so you can hold down shift and drag on a sphere in the Top view to scale it in x and y but leave z as it is, same as the Scale2D command.


- Michael

This looks good Michael.

Following on from this idea. How about having the same points on the rotate for snapping at specific degree increments?

I see these defaulting to 90 or 45 degrees but the actual steps could be set in preferences.

What do you think?