Marco,

I could do that of course but my point was basically that the behaviour of many "shape" commands is different on pressing the "enter" key using manual entries. Some will draw the shape immediatly and some need extra point(s) entered with the mouse. It's not the end of world of course but I thought it would be more consistent if the behaviour was the same.

Regards,
Felix

Hi Felix,

> here is an example of what I was saying about the dimension
> not being right and by far.

Can you please send me the 3DM model file that was used to get those dimensions?

Then I'd be able to test it over here and see what's going on with that.

If you need to keep the file private, please send it to me through e-mail at moi@moi3d.com .


> What's odd for me is when I enter the size manually and press
> enter, with the rectangle command, it draws it immediatly <...>

It depends on which rectangle command you are using. The rectangle 3pt command, the one here:



does not behave like you are describing - when you enter in a width and height for the rectangle 3 point command it still waits for you to enter click points to define the x and y axis directions for the rectangle.

Out of the rectangle commands, the rectangle 3 point command is the one that is most similar to the ellipse command, since they both take 3 points as inputs and they both deal with drawing an oriented shape instead of only an axis-aligned shape.

If you give both the rectangle 3 pt and the ellipse command a try you should see that they behave very similarly with the same workflow and steps between them.

The key difference between the other 2 rectangle commands (the rectangle from center and by corners commands) is that they only take 2 picks to completely finish the command. Since those commands generate an axis aligned rectangle only, they have enough information to finish when you have entered in 1 point and then a width and a height. Since the ellipse from center point command is not restricted to only make axis-aligned ellipses, it does not yet have enough information to finish when you have entered in only the width and the height.

So yes, those 2 rectangle commands behave differently than the ellipse command - that's expected since those ones take 2 picks to finish and are axis-aligned and the ellipse command takes 3 picks to finish and is not restricted to being axis-aligned. This does not mean that there is no similarity between how rectangles behave and how the ellipse command behaves though, as I mentioned previously the ellipse command behaves exactly the same as the other rectangle 3 point command.


> and when I do the same with the ellipse cmd, I also have
> to click a couple of times before the ellipse is drawn.

Yes - but notice that with each of those clicks you are defining the orientation of the ellipse, so you're handling the placement of it directly in the command. It behaves the same as the rectangle 3 point command.


In general it's part of MoI's overall drawing strategy that you should be able to draw the thing you want directly in the place that you want it - that's why all the various drawing commands allow you to specify all those things like width and height and radius and what-not. For example when you draw a sphere you are able to place the center point and then the radius to create a sphere of the size you want right off the bat instead of doing something like plopping in a "default" sphere into the origin and then doing an extra step to move and also size it, which is how some programs actually work.

Some commands include orientation as part of that, like rectangle 3 point or ellipse.


In the future it could be possible for me to make a plug-in command for you that would make an ellipse from center point that was forced to be axis-aligned and would then behave like you want, but it's not a bug in the current ellipse command that you pick 2 more times to finish the command - you are specifying orientation in those picks and that's an intentional part of how the regular command is set up to work.

- Michael

Hi Felix,

> Some will draw the shape immediatly and some need extra
> point(s) entered with the mouse. It's not the end of world
> of course but I thought it would be more consistent if the
> behaviour was the same.

That's correct, but the source of the inconsistency is that some commands are restricted to either only create an axis-aligned shape, or the alignment is uniform like with a circle (and thus more simplified).

So with those particular commands there can be fewer steps involved in the particular command.

Some other commands though incorporate the orientation of the shape directly into the drawing command itself and those ones can require another pick to define the orientation.

Often times there are a couple of different varieties of commands to have some in each of these flavors - that's the case for both rectangle and ellipse as well.

For rectangle the first 2 commands (by corner and by center point) make axis aligned shapes. If you want an axis aligned shape then those are the most convenient to use. But there's also a 3rd variety of rectangle command rectangle by 3 points which allows you to define the orientation of the rectangle right in the command. If you want to create a rectangle at a specific orientation that one can be more convenient to use since it allows you to create it directly where you want it without doing any extra repositioning steps later.

For ellipses, the first 2 ellipse commands incorporate orientation into the commands, while the 3rd ellipse command (the by corners one) makes an axis-aligned restricted one and so that last one requires fewer picks.

These differences between the drawing commands is an intentional part of the workflow design so that you have an overall more flexible toolbox of drawing commands at your disposal so that you can sometimes use simple axis-aligned tools for more efficiency and lower number of picks for basic stuff but you still have some other tools to do more advanced "in place" drawing available as well.

This kind of flexibility and variety is a good thing, I'd hate to lose that type of functionality just in the name of forcing absolute conformity. It's not bad to have uniform behavior in general but there are times when variety is useful too so it's a balance and it is not a goal to have 100% conformity at all costs or 100% variety either.

Hope this helps explain the overall design rationale better!

- Michael

Basically what it comes down to is that if I were to make the Ellipse command end after you had picked the first point and then entered in a width and height, the only way to do that is to make an axis-aligned ellipse.

If I did that, then the behavior would become inconsistent with the rectangle 3 point workflow.

Right now it's not like the Ellipse command is inconsistent with everything else - it behaves the same way as the rectangle 3 point command that deals with drawing an oriented rectangle.

- Michael

an awesome printscreen program that is free is gadwin http://gadwin.com/download/
Hit the prt sc button drag a box with the mouse and save to file / folder and or printer and or to clip board and to email, you can even change the destination between capture and save.
Save as jpg gif or even as a tiff
Its very good
cheers
shayne