Don't forget to check out the current frame that shows up when you insert a background image with View / Image - like I mentioned currently this is closest to what I am thinking of doing first, so any feedback on that would be helpful too.

Here's what it looks like in MoI when you insert an image:



You can see the 5 ghosted handles that frame the image. If you move over one of them, it will solidify and highlight. You can click and drag on one of the corner grips to scale, and click and drag on the rotate grip to rotate.

Additionally, if you click and release (instead of drag) on the rotate grip, a 3 axis rotate ball will appear:



At that point you can click and drag on any of those circles to perform a rotation around that axis. If you click off of a circle it will dismiss that larger rotation widget.

My current idea is to get this basic type of frame (probably with some additional tuneups, but the same basic idea) working on planar curves or surfaces.

I'm not sure yet how to extend it to work with 3D objects instead of only planar objects. But I think that just having it only for planar objects at first would still be very useful, so I'm thinking of taking that step first.

- Michael

Hi Will,

I'm glad you're not asking for a manipulator in MoI. :-) I'm not too keen on the idea of fiddling around with one of those gyroscope looking things....and besides, they get in the way of what you're lookin' at!

I wonder if a general objective to maintain precise dimensional accuracy is the reason you don't see the Illustrator type of transform tools in a lot of CAD programs? Rhino4 now has the cage editor and soft move which works as you envision I guess if you do a lot of sculptural modeling work and want to do it in Rhino, they come in handy.

Since MoI is easy enough to use as a 3D drawing board to quickly work up design variations before nailing down precise dimensions, the inclusion of 2d drawing tools makes sense.
Michael is probably already planning something like this (only better), but one of the 2D ArtCAM tools that I really like is called an envelope distortion tool..it's useful for making banners.

Jesse

Hey Michael,

I wasn't referring to your ghosted scale and rotate tool when I was talking about a gyroscope..your tool is about as unobtrusive as can be!
Is there anything behind the scenes in MoI that could be programmed to call up a 3D bounding box? In the interim, before you develop a more advanced 3D manipulation tool,
a bounding box selected with it's captured object could be scaled or rotated without too much difficulty and then deleted when you're done with it. The construction lines can already be used for this, but for an odd shaped object, a bounding box would give you a better handle on it.

Jesse

Hi Jesse, yup "unobtrusiveness" is a big design goal in that ghosted frame. The gyroscope doesn't show up unless you click and release on that one initial rotate grip, so it doesn't whap you in the face until you explicitly call it up. Again, you can see this in action in the current MoI build when inserting images.

> Is there anything behind the scenes in MoI that could be programmed to call up a 3D bounding box?

You mean just to be able to snap to the corners with the regular current rotate command?

Somehow I would like to extend that current 2D frame into 3D, one possibility for that is putting 8 corners for scaling, but I'm worried that putting those plus rotation grips hanging out in the middle of an object will lose the "unobtrusive" factor. I'm thinking maybe about possibly only showing one face of a 3D box at a time, with some way to switch between the faces, that would reduce the clutter by quite a bit.

- Michael

I don't think it be of any use in this type of modeling, I think that 99.5% of people will likely never use it, I just don't see how it could be useful in this program.

Obviously people vary. To me, 90 percent would use the manipulator!

Yep, that's it Michael, that would be NICE - anything so I can quickly scale and rotate items. That's all I'm asking for...

Jesse, that's a nice manipulator also.

As I had previously mentioned, the SRT commands are great for accurately getting things where you want and the way you need.

If you're dragging around your objects the majority of the time when using MOI, then you've already made a case for my request. At times, all you need to do is a quick scale and/or rotate as well that doesn't require select1, select2, manipulate, click done...

It's a small speed up in MOI that I think would be valuable. I like Michael's existing manipulator, it fits the bill just fine, AND it's already coded for one feature already, hopefully it can be extended for objects, curves and selected point[s] (not sure if rotating/scaling a single point is feasible!)

-Will

PS - As long as the manipulator centers itself around the bounding box of selected object(s) that would be fine (the norm) - IF you can also include a way to >reposition< the manipulator to move the center point, that would be hella handy for getting say an object to rotate around another object (orbits) - being able to snap that manipulator to other entities would be ICING on the cake!

A while back I came across this manipulator and thought you'd enjoy knowing about it.

The first link is there simply for your info; take special note on the second, towards the bottom portion of the web-page, where it makes reference to the Kite Geometry Manipulator:
http://www.ds.arch.tue.nl/Research/Projects/E3DAD/
http://www.win.tue.nl/~spranovi/research.htm

Cheers,

- Diego -

Thanks Diego, I hadn't seen that before, there are some interesting ideas there. It's rather large though, I'm kind of hoping for something that kind of keeps out of the way more so that it is possible to have it turned on most of the time without getting in the way.

- Michael

> Is there anything behind the scenes in MoI that could be programmed to call up a 3D bounding box?

You mean just to be able to snap to the corners with the regular current rotate command?

Hi Michael,

I'm thinking more for scaling operations...and this might be a case of where I'm applying Rhino characteristics to MoI in terms of the capability to easily scaling non-uniform shaped objects or objects with curvy geometry. I just did a comparison and see that MoI has better snapping tools.. it has no trouble snapping to the outer perimeters of an object with a planar projection, so for instance, even if you are only looking in the front viewport and snapping to the
highest and lowest point of an object which isn't straight up and down, MoI will project the location perpendicular to the X axis by default, where as in Rhino it takes an extra step because you have to turn Planar on if you don't normally have it on.

There was a bounding box manager for Rhino 3 as part of the Gelffing toolset that I found useful for scaling gemstones or objects with a lot of curvy geometry. There's experimental script for Rhino 4 that sort of accomplishes the same thing, but instead of typing numbers in a dialog box for X Y and Z lengths and locations. you have to use the non-uniform scaling tool on the bounding box

However, it's possible to do the same thing in MoI by laying down construction lines and scaling one dimension at a time..

What do you think of a ghosted bounding box used with a non-uniform scaling tool so you can do all three axes with one command in MoI?

Jesse

Hi Jesse,

Yup, MoI basically applies the Rhino-style Planar mode to operations inside of the ortho top/front/right sides by default. The idea is that picks in the 3D view are not constrained, but if you go to an ortho view I kind of assume that you want things to be planar to that view while working in those ones. So yes this can save extra steps and hopefully just makes things work more naturally without needing to know about turning another mode on or off to make planar things. But you can turn this off to have ortho views unconstrained by unchecking Options / Snaps / Project to plane in ortho views.

> What do you think of a ghosted bounding box used with a non-uniform scaling
> tool so you can do all three axes with one command in MoI?

Well, that's basically what a 3D version of that editing frame with corner grips would give you...

Also another thing similar to this is having an object properties panel that shows you the dimensions of the bounding box, and if those were editable that would be an easy way to do this as well.

- Michael

>Well, that's basically what a 3D version of that editing frame with corner grips would give you...

Also another thing similar to this is having an object properties panel that shows you the dimensions of the bounding box, and if those were editable that would be an easy way to do this as well.


How did I miss that? I guess I didn't understand that the 3D editing frame would enable you to scale with precise dimensions...I do some freehand scaling of curves but not of objects, so if I change dimensions of an object, it's because I want it to be an exact value. The object properties panel sounds ideal for scaling imported gemstone objects.

Thanks,

Jesse

Hi Jesse,

> How did I miss that? I guess I didn't understand that the 3D editing frame
> would enable you to scale with precise dimensions...

Sorry, I wasn't following you - the frame editing would indeed be mostly for eyeballing, not for entering direct numbers (although snapping should work there).

But yeah, from what you are describing the properties panel would be perfect since it would be totally focused on entering numbers there.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

No problem, I thought I understood what you initially said about rotating with the 3d edting frame,
which is why I asked about non-uniform scaling,,, it would sorta be cool to be able to do it,
but if you can enter all the numbers in the panel, that's much easier than scaling to different
dimensions in all 3 axes, while looking to hit the right numbers on the bottom toolbar.
Come to think of it, I've tried it a few times, but I can't remember ever actually using the non-unifom
scale tool in Rhino.

Jesse