Hi Will -

> Well in Rhino, this was solved by popping up a context menu
> that allows you to select the item you want when there are
> overlapping objects - why not do similar?

Yeah, that's how I set up Rhino, but I have come to view that kind of "in your face big pop-up" type thing to have been a bad UI design choice. It is just too distracting to have it pop up all the time, it tends to come up unexpectedly and interrupts your workflow constantly.

It was a major goal for MoI to avoid that - it is one of the ingredients that makes for such a smoother workflow in MoI. It basically kind of attempts to do the complete opposite and show you what will happen before you click rather than doing something after you click.


I'm thinking of possibly doing it though for this one particular case of stacked curve/edge, but I'm not completely enthusiastic about it because I don't want to incur the same kind of workflow interruption penalty.

- Michael

In my opinion, things are just fine as is - I just did not initially see it. Once you know it's there, all is good in the world...

>Yeah, that's how I set up Rhino, but I have come to view that kind of "in your face big pop-up" type thing
>to have been a bad UI design choice. It is just too distracting to have it pop up all the time, it tends to
>come up unexpectedly and interrupts your workflow constantly.

I can appreciate the reasoning and yes, it did pop up - a lot!

I'm trying to think of what would be kool for MOI, dunno, short of some Flash(y) roll out kinda selection thingy (in other words a context menu LOL...)

I tend to agree however along the thoughts of perhaps there should be some kind of indication (color or otherwise) between edges and curves.

This is separate from the problem of trying to see the two on top of each other (e.g. yellow + pink (edges) == orange?..)

Actually for me, I think the curve should dominate between the two. Of course a setting "Dominate Edges / Curves" could let one pick which entity (color) would be displayed if the two overlapped...

Of course I'm a fan of small font "breadcrumb" links on my Joomla pages - perhaps when the cursor is overlapping multiple entities, a breadcrumb list can appear either in the GUI or next to the cursor (closedcrv | opencrv1 | opencrv2| srfedge...) which when clicked would make the selection.

Admittedly if it's too long from a bunch of overlaps it'll get ugly fast unless it's fixed length and scrolls left & right as the cursor moves along it...

-Will

>Yeah, that's how I set up Rhino, but I have come to view that kind of "in your face big pop-up" type thing to have been a bad UI design choice. It is just too distracting to have it pop up all the time, it tends to come up unexpectedly and interrupts your workflow constantly.

In maya you can turn off the ability to select certain surfaces by just clicking an icon - maybe moi could have something similar, like a shortcut key that toggles nurbs curve selection and displays it as a text message in the viewport for a few seconds like: "nurbs curves selection: OFF" or something like that.. that way it wouldnt be in the way/clutter moi's interface.