For a cube Scale 3D + Button "Center Bounding Box" don't make the trick ?

Frenchy

I don't want to scale a cube it just used to illustrate the point that Stav and myself are trying to make.

The cube could be any object from a curve to a weird looking organic solid shape.

Hi Kevin,

> I just tried it out and it seems to scale the whole object up and down in size rather than
> in one direction only (along the normal) like SCALE 1D.

Yup, that's correct - sorry it wasn't clear to me that you were wanting to do a one directional scale, I was thinking you were talking about a uniform scale which does work with the edit frame in that kind of arrangement (viewing straight down on planar objects).

I wonder if I should do something special for planar objects being viewed along their length like that, like always align the edit frame with the object... I worry a bit though about the kinds of edits that would then be actually disabled like mirroring or flattening things to the world axis directions. Maybe I could do something like use right-click on an frame handle to switch bounding box modes from world to object relative.


> Hopefully this example explains it better ?

Yeah I already understand the kinds of situations where it would be useful - I was just showing that in the example that you showed you can actually use the existing edit frame to scale those kinds of planar sections as long as you're talking about a uniform scale.

And again just to be clear for others reading this, it is already possible to scale a non-axis-aligned box the way you want there, you can use the Transform > Scale > Scale1D tool to do that, that allows you to specifically pick the direction of the scaling so you just snap the direction line onto the edges of the box and you'll be able to do that kind of one directional box stretch.


- Michael

Michael

Thanks, glad it is clear now. In polygon modellers one of the most useful tools is be able to place and rotate your widget where you want.

I currently use two techniques in MoI for getting around the edit frame limitations.

1. Scale 1D
2. Align cplane with object and then use edit frame.


But certainly being able to quickly align the edit frame with the object or even rotate the edit frame where your want would be quicker than the above two options.

Like I said earlier, you have a million feature requests to work on and this is one more for the list. There are currently ways of working around it so its not the biggest issue but just a nice to have request.

The reason I bought this up is because I use Andrei's loft->loose->exact method for the majority of my work and the curves are often not perpendicular to the XYZ axis which makes squishing them to shape with the edit frame problematical because the edit frame can't align with the object, so I use the 2 methods above in those instances. Its a little slower this way but the job still gets done.

Can you post just a very little example of 3D objects with the sections (or other) that you want to move copy or orient or modify or create?
A very tiny example will be sufficient :)

Frenchy

Here is a Japanese WWII aircraft I am working on.

As you can see there are lot of curves involved in making such a model. A lot of the curves are not parallel or perpendicular to the XYZ plane hence the reason for making a request to align the edit frame with the object to make manipulating curves and surfaces easier.

Nice plane!

Take me just a simple cylinder or a simple volume and 2 sections (or other curves) who will be not oriented on the xyz planes and where who want to put it!
For reseach a speed process! :)

Hi Kevin, just to clarify a little bit here - you wrote:

> A lot of the curves are not parallel or perpendicular to the XYZ plane hence the reason for making
> a request to align the edit frame with the object to make manipulating curves and surfaces easier.

For curves that have absolutely no alignment whatsoever to any XYZ plane, it probably isn't really feasible for the edit frame to get aligned to them because the edit frame is fundamentally a 2D thing, in the Top, Front, and Right views the edit frame is intended to be a frame that's parallel to each individual view. In the 3D view it can go around planar objects, but because the edit frame is itself only a planar object it doesn't really work for it to go around something like a box, that will need a different kind of edit mechanism to handle that sort of thing.

In your first example that you posted, although the sections were rotated they still appeared to be planar sections that were being viewed edge-on, meaning that their plane normal is perpendicular to the view direction. I'm not sure now if you're still referring to that kind of arrangement or not since you're talking about not perpendicular to anything...

In the future I would like to have some different kinds of edit mechanisms that might be more similar to the type of manipulator gizmos that you're used to. But those will likely be some kind of separate thing from the edit frame - the edit frame is meant to work similar to a 2D drawing program and so the in each 2D view, the frame is oriented to that view.

- Michael

Michael

Thinking about this some more I think having a separate gizmo for manipulating curves and surfaces would be a better option and more flexible than trying to make the edit frame do to much and thus making it too complicated to use.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with in future versions of MoI.

Thanks for taking the time to respond and get an understanding of the need for a local coordinates manipulator as per Stav's original post.

"""""""While Im at it please let me ask one more thing.....
When I am editing points on a curve I often select objects around the points by accident....can be very frustrating.
Is there a way to have moi ignore other object selection while I am i points edit mode?"""""""""""""

Probably what you are looking for, beside "locking" objects, is that "Ctrl+Shift" will temporarily disable "Picking", which can allow you to window select things, like groups of points "within/on" a surface/curve....