Hi Mark, so here's an illustration for why asking just for some generic "position" of an object is ambiguous.
Here's an object that I have drawn - what would you consider to be it's distance from the origin?
Would it be the location on the curve that is closest to the origin, like this:
Or maybe the distance from the origin to one of the endpoints like this:
Or maybe the distance from the origin to the center of the object's bounding box like this:
So note that these all have different distance values, so it's not very meaningful to ask for " THE distance", as if there is only one special value for that, because you need to specify which particular point on the object you want to measure it from.
Note that in many cases such as this one here just taking the center of the object's bounding box can be a kind of meaningless arbitrary point, so I'm not really too keen on just elevating that particular one to some special value in the UI - that would kind of make it seem like you were doing something accurate by using that value when it's really just some arbitrary thing.
If you use the Move command, that lets you pick a point on the object as the first step of the command, and having that point specified then gives it the context needed to be able to speak of distances and positions.
- Michael |
