Thanks Michael.
Actually I often prefer the way MOI does individual face extrusions over the Wings3D approach. I use a lot of symmetry in my virtual architectual designs though and that's where the Wings3D approach comes in handy extruding several faces along different normals simultaneously. (My "virtual architectural designs" are very far from being "standard" architecture!)
I've included a screenshot of a simple Wings3D primitive below for consideration in our related brainstorming here.
When you said:
>"One thing that I was thinking of trying was to show all the normal directions on the screen as dashed lines
> and then using the one that was closest to the mouse. But that might get messy if there are quite a bunch
> of lines showing on the screen.
>
> Another possibility would be to just pick a single normal direction, maybe the one from the object that was
> first selected, and just track along that. That's kind of a more simple thing to set up."
>
...I think you might be close to a possible solution to this with that last concept. In the image below, for instance, if this object were in MOI and rather than being similarly selected on symmetrically opposing faces was instead selected on only one face, perhaps a script could be introduced which offered an option of extruding any exactly symmetrical faces to a given face selection (assuming any exist) and then required the user to select which of those exactly symmetrical faces to extrude prior to basing the final symmetrical extrusions parameters on the users subsequent extrusion of the originally selected face.
Sorry... lots of words there... I guess what I'm trying to say is this:
1) A hypothetical object has 36 faces total, 12 of which are exactly symmetrical to each other.
2) The user wants to extrude 6 of those 12 faces in a similarly symmetrical manner (which would also be along their normals)
3) User selects 1 of the 6 faces and fires up a hotkeyed extrusion script
4) The script examines the selected face against all faces of the object looking for exact existing symmetry.
5) The script then notifies the user of the number of existing matches it located and prompts the user to select among them and hit "done"
6) The script then deselects all but the original face and prompts the user to extrude that originally selected face as desired and to hit "done" again, at which time the script translates that first extrusion to symmetrical versions for the additional faces previously selected and executes additional symmetrical extrusions upon those additional faces automatically.
Granted, that approach wouldn't be in realtime, but it would definitely have it's uses by many folks here in addition to me I'm sure. For me something similar to this would be a fairly big timesaver, but there are of course different ways to do this via mirroring, arrays, and perhaps even construction lines (which I'm a newbie with!).
If such an approach were practical it could also perhaps be similarly used for repetetive scaling operations on symmetrical parts as well.
I agree with you on the potential of additional dashed lines being a clutter nuisance and wouldn't want to approach it that way either, but perhaps an optional script approach similar to this might be handy as a workaround.
What do you think?
- 3dvisuals dude
