[Bf-funboard] Curves creating and Transform

[Martin Poirier]

--- Matt Ebb <matt at mke3.net> wrote:

I clipped of some parts of your message to which I
agreed earlier in my reply, in an effort to keep that
readable in a reasonnable amount of time.

> Yes, you're right. In the frustration of my rant I
> must have made a 
> mistake, like pressing T instead of R. Incidentally,
> this still gives 
> you the whole 'transform' feedback like the dotted
> line and Rot: value 
> in the header, but doesn't actually do anything to a
> 2D curve. Again, 
> hardly intuitive.

Which brings a nice question.
What to do when the user tries to tilt a 2D curve?
Nothing (cancel the tilt operation) or toggle on the
3Dness of the curve?

I'd personnally be more in favor of solution 2. While
a bit magical, it keeps in line with the "standard"
Blender line of thought that the user knows what he
wants to do.

> > Which is why you should use Aligned Handles in
> those
> > case, not Free Handles.
> 
> Well, that's not really solving the problem. Part of
> the annoyance is 
> that you need to keep switching through a thousand
> different modes (and 
> remember what they all do) just to edit a point. In
> Blender, there's no 
> way to edit both the size of the CP+tangents and its
> rotation at the 
> same time.

Indeed, that's why I suggested a special toggle to
choose between proportionnal handle editing or not.
This would be very similar to what Illustrator does.
Simple hotkey (if we can find one) and button in the
2D view header (akin to the selection modes for
meshes, the PET, ...).

>
http://mke3.net/blender/interface/interaction/illu_whitearrow.mp4
> 

Kinda off topic, but I think this is a great example
why I think the Blender workflow of transform through
hotkeys and simple keyboard/non precise clicks
activated constraining is superior to click
drags/transform widgets (not even mentionning the fact
that holding down a mouse button during a motion that
could demand precision is ridiculous).

At approximately the half of the video, look how you
try to move the handle by click dragging, misses the
hotspot (by not much) and end up not moving anything
AND loosing your selection.

Others can feel free to disagree, of course.

> It still isn't very intuitive though, having it
> change the curve like this 
> when you press a completely different key
> (especially when the 
> transformation doesn't do anything).

That goes a bit with the tilt problem earlier and is a
good example of blender "fixing" some parameters in
order to do what the user really wanted to do.

Whether that is good or not is debatable.

> Perhaps a small compromise for some of these
> complaints would be to set 
> the handles to aligned by default, rather than auto.
> At the very least, 
> it would remove the stupid 'press this other key if
> you actually want 
> to edit your CP' step.

That brings up another problem though. How do you
calculate the handle for a newly created CV (extrusion
or Ctrl-click)?
Though what could be done is apply the auto-handle
calculations to calculate the original handles and
then have the resulting mode be aligned.

> In any case, I believe the two main points of my
> previous rant remain. 
> One, that Blender's curve creation and editing could
> do with a lot of 
> improvements and two, that this mailing list should
> be used for 
> constructive discussion and analysis like Martin's
> provided here. All 
> this 'Blender is perfect, shut up and RTFM' nonsense
> is not on.

Agreed on both points.
For the later, it really helps jumpstart a discussion
if the original poster brings arguments/debatable
points and not just "lets do this" kind of things.

Though I personnally think some people would deserve a
nice "shut up" once in a while, but I'll follow stivs
advice and refrain. Since it's christmas and all...

Martin


		
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