Hello, yeah im annoying with requests :D

I like the Rect from center tool, its very cool but it lack something.
You should have two snap points, the corner + the edge close to it.
For example draw a circle that's not align on any grid, then try to draw the bounding box... yeah its impossible !
You can do it with a mix of tools (lines) of course but its not very fast.

A cool thing would be:
1. Choose the center point, click
2. Choose the corner point and snap it to something, click
3. 4 points appears, each one on the middle of one of the 4 edges
4. Move these points with your mouse and the Rect is redrawing
5. Snap any of these points on anything you want

Or you can just have a checkbox to check between the step 1 and 2 to enable further control.

This can apply to the Box from center too !

(Im so fast at making that watch, thanks MoI :D)

Seems very easy :)
Grid disable / Straight Snap enable / Object Snap Enable
Draw a circle (so center is marked as "hot snap" point!)
call Rectangle by center
draw an helper line horizontal tangent by the "Quadran hot snap" of the circle
Now Box rectangular by center can be drawn!
Click center Circle, Click Intersection ("Square", "Intersection" helper line)

= You have your box (a square) around the circle, and can manipulate now with it own box "edit frame"
Can't be more simple ;) (an half second realized)

Just had a quick look at how to do this (draw bounding box for non-grid-aligned circle):

1. Make sure you have object-snapping enabled
2. Snap to the circle's highlighted center snap point
3. Move straight up to the top of the circle until the 'quad' snap point appears
4. Create a horizontal construction line from that point
5. Move along the construction line until 'Square' appears at the circle's centre
6. Click and you're done


Edit - Pilou posted similar reply whilst I was typing mine

:) no problem :)

Yeah I know all these way to do it. That's why I made this request.
Its just boring to do that for like 30 times or more.
For the watch im doing for example I do a lot of bounding box for typography or just for c-lines.
Because I need to align the middle point of the bounding box, with asymetrical things that has no middle points.

It would be cool to have a check box on the Rect tool, to further tweak the rectangle, without need to disable/enable things
I work very fast with MoI because its awesomly thinked, I can truely, but there's still little details needed to smooth the workflow.
(my other request "line from center point" is another one)

(french for Pilou because my english sucks, en gros j'aimerait bien très rapidement tracer mon rectangle grossièrement et bouger les edges, a partir d'un point nodal au centre de chaque edge, bien sur les autres edges se re-dimensionnerait en temps réel, genre un rectangle en bougeant l'edge du haut les 2 edges de cotés sont modifiés.)

< genre un rectangle en bougeant l'edge du haut les 2 edges de cotés sont modifiés
Et bien c'est ce qui se passe avec la boîte de déformation!

Et sinon le simple fait de faire "Voir Points" permet de bouger comme on veut un côté ;)

Oui mais non j'ai tout essayé avant de poster, c'est proportionnel par rapport au pivot et même si ça ne l'était pas le point est sur un coin, ça va pas pour une bounding box d'un object circulaire ou freeform. Ce que je demande c'est juste une étape optionnelle en + lors du traçage d'un rectangle.

Sorry for the english people, im just explaining that the deformation gizmo or deformation "box" is not appropriate because it keeps ratio from the pivot point, and its from corners, not easy when you have freeform or circular shapes. Im just asking for an aditionnal optionnal step when shaping my rectangle.

and like that? Move a yellow point move all yellow points without deformation
But without an example image i am afraid that not fully understand the problem :)

The goal would be to very fast draw a rectangle around anything and then tweak the edges by moving middles points.

@Pilou C'est pas vraiment ça en faite.
Imagine pour chaque lettre ou chiffre sur ma montre je fait des boundings box (j'ai mes raisons :D)
Donc tu as ta lettre par exemple un "S" en vue de haut, tu trace très vite un rectangle englobant le "S" a la main sans même te snapper.
Au moment ou ton rectangle est tracé ben si t'a coché la case "tweak" juste avant de placer le coin, t'a 4 points qui apparaissent.
1 point au millieu de chaque edge du rectangle. Et en bougeant chacun de ses points en click+drag tu affine ta bounding box.
Bien sur une fois que t'a affiné tu peux plus revenir en arrière.

J'espère que t'a compris ce que je demandais :)

Draw this rectangular bounding box the more quickly?

Exactly! But I start from the letter not rotated.
Maybe a button to calculate the bounding box would be more appropriate.

Seems a plug can do that easily! But Problem is there is an infinities of bounding box possible!
So waiting Michael answer ;)

Yeah that would be cool.
The awesome thing is that you can then use the intersection between the bounding box and the shape to move it, or align etc..
Bounding box for 2d shape is easy, there's only 1 possibilities. For 3d too I think.
In all 3d packages you can switch viewport to bounding box, so I think its easy math to do :D

< Bounding box for 2d shape is easy, there's only 1 possibilities.
I am not sure ;)
It's the same "S"

Yes I know, you may see the same S but its totally different curves for the software.
Bounding box must be used before rotation :)

Hi DesuDeus,

> I like the Rect from center tool, its very cool but it lack something.
> You should have two snap points, the corner + the edge close to it.
> For example draw a circle that's not align on any grid, then try to
> draw the bounding box... yeah its impossible !
> You can do it with a mix of tools (lines) of course but its not very fast.

As Pilou and Paul mentioned, it is actually not impossible at all! Just use construction lines to get your circle framed, it only takes a couple of seconds.

Maybe it is not clear that a Construction line is actually a special helper object in MoI and not the same as just drawing in additional regular line objects that you then have to erase.

Construction lines are special helpers that you can create any time you are drawing, by holding down the mouse and dragging on a point instead of clicking on the point.

So for example in your case you describe here about drawing a box around a circle not grid aligned, that looks like this:



So as you can see there, definitely not impossible! :)

And that can be done quickly too, just a couple of seconds as you can see.

Note that you do not have to exit the command to create construction lines - when I'm talking about "construction lines" I don't mean drawing additional regular line objects in the scene, I mean using the special quick construction line helper tool that you can do by dragging instead of clicking on points.

- Michael

Hi DesuDeus, from some of your other comments it sounds like you want a general tool to frame any selection of objects.

Something like that would be a more specialized "BoundingBox" command and would not be part of the drawing tools.

For a bounding box command you would not pick any points at all, you would just select objects, run "BoundingBox" and have it generate the frame - that kind of "generation from selected objects" is a lot different than a drawing tool.

Probably for the next beta release I can make a plugin for you that will do that kind of frame creation.

- Michael

Look at my answer in the "line from center point" request, your answer about c-lines helped me.

Okey cool, but in your example you have a circle, you can use the quad of the circle to help you.
Show me with the "S" letter that Pilou showed, how do you do it fast?
A bounding box command would be perfect yes :) Even better if it works in 3d too :D
And also if it works with multiples objects, just like the scale/rotate gizmo that show up when you select objects.

Thanks again for the explanations.

Hi DesuDeus,

> Okey cool, but in your example you have a circle, you can
> use the quad of the circle to help you.

Yes, but the reason that I had a circle there because your initial question in this thread was about a circle :)

You wrote:


> Show me with the "S" letter that Pilou showed, how do you do it fast?

You wouldn't really want to try and draw a rectangle manually around something like that with the Rect from center tool, you would want to have a command generate that for you.


> A bounding box command would be perfect yes :) Even better if it works
> in 3d too :D And also if it works with multiples objects, just like the
> scale/rotate gizmo that show up when you select objects.

Yes, it would be basically like making that scale/rotate edit frame but as an rectangle curve object if you had all planar shapes, or as a box if you had 3D objects.

I'll see about cooking up a special command for that for the next beta.

- Michael

I should buy you cookies and ship them at you ;)
Thanks for all !