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?

I'm not sure but I think I'd like a "angle list" similar to what some illustration apps like ACDSee (previously Deneba) Canvas and others provide.

I typically have my rotation snap angle set to 15 degrees but some apps allow you to specify arbitrary angles; "15,30,45,60,90..." etc.

This lets you specify exact angles instead of a single angle step.

However, having that isn't too important - either way as long as the angle is a user config'd option...

-Will

Hi Will, hi ash - for rotation I was thinking of using the same snap settings as you can currently use for drawing an angled line.

This can be changed under Snaps / Straight snap options / Snap angle, the default is 90 degrees.

Do you think it should be a different setting from that?

- Michael

As always - give the user the choice if possible :-)

For myself I would probably like the two to be different settings.

"This can be changed under Snaps / Straight snap options / Snap angle, the default is 90 degrees.

Do you think it should be a different setting from that?"

Hi Michael, yeah, I already have mine set to 15 degrees...


I'm fine with it as it is, I guess it's up to you if you want to code in more options - it would be nice of course.

I still can't wait to try out the new frame! :-)

-Will

The thing is, too many options can also cause problems, especially for similar things. For example it can be frustrating if you find a snap angle setting in one spot, and set it, but then the thing you are actually using is controlled by a different snap angle setting somewhere else...

Will, if there was another setting, it sounds like the first thing that you would do would be to set it to be equal to the other kind of angle snap to get them working the same, right?

I think I will make this off of the same setting for now, but if you run into issues where you wish they were separated, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

- Michael

Hi,

While working on a document in Photoshop, I've noticed that if you press alt while dragging the corner handles (In free transform) the center widget becomes the origin of the scaling action. This overrides the normal "opposite corner handle" origin.


If a similar gymnastic were possible in Moi, it might be quite interesting...


Marc

Hi Marc, I do have a similar thing set up for this. Except instead of using Alt, you can switch between scale-from-corner and scale-from-center by clicking a corner grip (press and release the mouse button without dragging).

I've got simple rotation working now, just working on a couple of more tune-ups to that. You'll be able to do a rotation of a specific angle by setting the angle constraint in the bottom toolbar either before or during dragging the rotation grip.

- Michael

Hi Michael, will it be possible to drag the center point elsewhere?

Marc

Hi Marc,

> will it be possible to drag the center point elsewhere?

For scaling no, but I think for rotation yes. I haven't quite gotten to that part of the rotation stuff yet though.

- Michael