when I select a point or object in the 3D viewport and try to LMB click drag it somewhere with snapping disabled, the point moves in all directions but not where I would like it to go. It seems to prefer the Z axis and move away from the viewport camera as far as possible.

At first I thought it was because I'm using a Wacom, but using a mouse gave me the same results.

Is this a known issue, or do I need to change some preference ?

Thanks,

-Ronald

Hi Ronald, if I understand you correctly that is an intentional feature - holding down Alt and doing a left click and drag does camera manipulation in the 3D viewport, that's another possible way to do it in addition to just plain right button drag, I added that in because there are several programs that do viewport manipulation that way (with Alt, Shift+Alt, or Ctrl+Alt and left drag) and so having that in addition to the regular ways tends to make MoI just a little more friendly to people who are mostly used to some other program.

If you want to disable snapping for doing a drag, push Alt _after_ you have started the drag instead of holding it down before the drag.

- Michael

Hey Michael,

I can't imagine this being a feature ;-)

I've put a screencap movie in dropbox that might explain the problem a little better:https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4271217/moidrag.mov

Thanks,

-Ronald

Hi Ronald, thanks for making the screencap movie.

What's happening there is that your mouse is tracking along the construction plane grid. Then you're shifting the view so you're viewing that plane at a pronounced angle, that means that much of the grid plane is way off in the horizon a long distance away. If you then move your mouse towards that horizon line that will result in points that are a pretty long distance away.

If you don't want that to happen, you will probably want to be looking at a more downwards angle at the construction plane when working in the 3D view rather than at such a glancing angle to it, or also you can change the construction plane, if you want to edit things in a more vertical direction in the 3D view set the construction plane to be vertically oriented instead.

You can change the construction plane using the View > CPlane command, also see here for some shortcuts you can set up:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2168.17

Another thing you can try is to switch the 3D view projection from perspective to a parallel projection instead, you can do that under Options > View > 3D view projection. Perspective projections have that kind of pronounced foreshortening with a far off horizon line in them.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,

I see, so it snaps to the construction grid. I was kind of assuming dragging geometry or points this way would work like the tweak tool in XSI or like it does in most 3D apps. So is this by design, or something that will be improved in the future ?

Thanks,

-Ronald

Hi Ronald, yes it's intended to work that way - it basically goes along with the overall focus in MoI on accuracy.

Most things in MoI work by trying to interact more directly with some specific geometry, like in this case the construction plane. Another example is when you do an extrusion, when you move the mouse MoI does not just map some amount of kind of arbitrary mouse pixel distance to some 3D movement, it instead tracks how close your mouse is to the extrusion direction line, that allows for things like object snaps to other geometry to generate an extrusion of the same height as other surrounding objects...

In the future it could be possible to have some option to enable the type of tweak tool method that you're used to, but if it just worked by moving in the view plane direction it's still quite easy to kind of tweak what was originally a planar curve like in your video to be nonplanar and that's often not good.

The focus in MoI for curve editing is more on 2D editing, I'd recommend switching to the Front or Right view (use the view tabs on the bottom toolbar), and editing the curve in that 2D view.

- Michael

Hi Michael, it would be great if there would be something like a tweak tool that would only move geometry in the view plane's direction. I'm aware that it's easy to create non planar geometry that way, but the way it works now will create it for sure. I'm tying to use Moi for a little more organic shapes, and at the moment it's a little frustrating if I want to tweak geometry without snapping. I could use the front, top or side view, but if geometry is at an angle it's almost impossible to edit without screwing up. I tried disabling perspective in the 3D view, but that doesn't seem to have any effect.

But other that that MoI is a great tool, the whole snapping system is brilliant, very fast and easy to work with. And thanks for taking the time to explain.

-Ronald