Why not use Transform / Orient / Line-Line ?
That works on any orientation!

Frenchy,

I start off with thickest wing cross section and copy it multiple times along the length of the wing. I then have to scale each of those cross sections down in size to match the front profile of the wing.

I use scale 1D for this, but if local coordinates worked with edit frame it would be even easier.

This is just an example to make a point about how local coordinates and widgets would be useful to have to speed up the workflow. I can easily find other workarounds within Moi which is what I am currently doing, they are just a little slower.

And use the View/CPlane temporary don't help ?

Hi Kevin,

> Once I rotate one of those cross sections (eg to match the angle of the wing), I can no
> longer use the edit frame because it squashes the profile out of shape because the edit
> frame doesn't work on local coordinates (see attached image).

I'm not sure if I'm understanding your specific example there - are you in the Top view there and working on profiles which are vertical planar curves?

How does the edit frame end up squashing your profile in that particular case? If you're in the Top view if you either rotate or scale the shape it should still remain a planar vertically oriented curve, no matter what bounding frame it presents...

- Michael

Michael

I am in front view.
Hopefully this image is clearer than my roughly drawn one.

The edit frame when squashing the cross sections in front view aligns with World Coordinate System rather a local Coordinate system.

@Frenchy

Yes aligning the cplane is another way in MoI.


I think both of you are missing the point. There are otherways you can achieve the same thing in MoI and most software for that matter but having a widget or edit frame that you scale, rotate or move in the Local Coordinate system of the object is quicker and easier than all the otherways which is the reason most 3D software have such an option.

Is it something similar to this Kevin? http://screencast.com/t/Pz7vK9P0Emk

Clicking the right mouse button on the rotation handle (edit frame turns green) causes that particular software to enter the kind of mode I think you're describing.



Martin.

I must miss something :)
When you rotate something with the Edit Frame it's from the center of rotation of the object so local one for the selected object?
Or any point of the 3D space if you move the little "star"

Can you put an image before / after of what that don't work ? or a little file 3Dm of the result wished

Here in the 3D view (does the circular dashed points + star = a gimble ? )

Hi Kevin,

> I am in front view.
> Hopefully this image is clearer than my roughly drawn one.
>
> The edit frame when squashing the cross sections in front view aligns with
> World Coordinate System rather a local Coordinate system.

If you use the edit frame to do a uniform scale up or down it's not really particularly relevant which specific orientation the edit frame has right then, it will do a uniform scale from the bounding box center and that should not do anything that I'd term "squashing" to the curve.

It would only get skewed (in rotation, which you can then adjust by grabbing the rotation handle) if you track along one of the x or y directions of the edit frame which does a one-directional scale instead of a uniform scale. But you can solve this by just moving your mouse some distance away from those one-directional scale tracking lines and that will then "shake off" the one directional scaling and do uniform scaling instead.

Here's an example - notice how after I "shake off" the one directional tracking that it then does a uniform scale which should not squash your curve at all:




- Michael

"Shake off"......... Learn something new every day!


Grandmaster flash and Mellie Mel would be proud.

Hi Burr, yeah so the way the "shake off" works is if you move your mouse far enough away from either of the X or Y tracking lines, when you move your mouse back to that original area it won't attempt to track onto those X or Y lines anymore.

That can help you to do some finer tuned uniform scaling with the edit frame, basically turning off the one-directional scaling for just that handle grab.

- Michael

I had seen you mention before about getting "away" from it, but always struggled and resorted to lots of "zooming and panning" to keep in the "diagonal drag"......

It was enlightening to realize it could create that second mode. The temporary turn off. the unform scale only. The bees knees.

Michael,

Thanks for the tip about shake to scale. 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.


When working in 3D just about everything is placed at weird angles so having the ability to align the edit frame with the objects normal would make it more useful if you just need to scale it in one axis.

If we use a cube as an example. I have rotated it in 3D so it is no longer aligned to the XY plane.
In polygon modellers you can then align the scale widget to the normal of the object and can then grab any of the handles to scale the object in 1D along that axis.

The second image shows how MoI works, when you try to scale along any of the axis you distort your cube.

Hopefully this example explains it better ?

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