Hi Metin, thanks for your feedback! I'm afraid that most of these things will probably not happen anytime soon or are actually working as intended already, but I will give you some more info on each one:
> In some tools, such as the scale tool and the sphere radius, when you go to the numerical value
> entry, there’s no live update in the viewport, and when you press Tab or Enter, the value is applied.
This is how these are intentionally designed - it's basically assumed that if you're more interested in how things look rather than controlling a specific scale factor that you would be using the mouse to place points interactively rather than typing in a numeric scale factor value.
> So if the scale value isn’t to your liking you have to undo, activate the tool
> again, set the center again, and enter a different value.
Right, but unfortunately the alternative that you are asking for would require adding an extra stage to all those commands, requiring an extra action to complete the command. Right now for example if you want to draw a sphere of radius 5, at the radius prompt you can just type 5 and push enter and the command will finish and you'll have your sphere done. That's useful for being able to efficiently create things with specific values.
If you want to gauge your sphere more by how it looks instead of at a particular radius, use your mouse to pick the radius instead of typing it in, you will see feedback of the sphere changing on every mouse move.
> Option to easily change points from smooth to corner and vice versa, after a shape is created.
This is something that I want to add in the future, I think a control for it will show up in the properties panel. I'm not sure when it will happen probably sometime in the v4 timeframe.
> 2D vector export that creates a closed outline per separate surface, so the shape(s) can be
> filled straight away with a 2D vector tool, without the need to join vertices first.
I'm kind of uncertain about this because it does not fit very well with curved surfaces, for example how would you expect a sphere to come out with this method? What about a cylinder? I'm not too sure about making something like this which only works very well with a certain limited kind of object structure...
> 2D vector export option to create a shared, closed outline around objects with separate styles.
There is an option close to this with the new hidden-line export when saving to .AI or .PDF formats, enable "Generate outlines" to get these kinds of curves. You can also control whether the outlines go on a layer for the style or on their own layer, click the "Line style options" button to control that part of the output. The outline will probably have some small fragments in different areas of it and will require some manual cleanup to make a completely closed form though, trying to make that happen automatically is a very complex task which I do not expect to have anytime soon.
> Exported AI files from MoI won’t load in Inkscape.
That's a limitation of Inkscape, it doesn't support the AI version 8 type AI files that MoI and many other 3D programs export, it only supports V9 and newer AI files which are actually the same as PDF files. But since Inkscape does support PDF you should be able to get stuff into there by just using PDF export out from MoI instead of AI export.
> I’d love the UI to remember which Objects / Types / Styles roll-outs I had open in my
> last session. Now you have to click them open again with each new session.
This is something that I want to implement in the future, it will probably happen in the v4 timeframe.
> A warning message for the Blend tool when you’ve selected curves in stead of edges.
I'm not really keen on popping up big "in your face" warning messages like that. Possibly in the future I may have a kind of "feedback" area where some text notifications can be displayed and then this could go there. That may be a fair ways out though.
> Moving selections by using the cursor keys (with a key like Control for moving 1/10th of a unit).
> I noticed there’s a plug-in script for this, but it would be great if it would be a standard MoI function.
I've thought some about making the Nudge function built in, but for now just installing the plugin will do what you need here.
> Soft selection option for points with adjustable influence / falloff, so you can move one point
> and influence neighboring points. This would be very useful for manipulating curves,
> surfaces and solids with many points.
Possibly in the future, surface control point modification is not really a focus area for MoI currently, I kind of generally assume that if you need that type of point manipulation you would be doing that work in a sub-d modeler instead which usually have that kind of soft selection function in them.
> Option to set the number of points in a curve during creation, especially for circles and ellipses.
How many points are displayed for a particular circle or ellipse will probably be part of an advanced properties dialog in the future. It will be something you can set _after_ you've created the circle or ellipse though, when you create it, it's basically internally created as a perfect circle and if you turn on control points for it, you see the control points for a rebuilt squishable version for it. You can use the Rebuild command currently to do what you need here though.
- Michael
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