[Bf-funboard] custom/normal/etc view enhancement possibilities

[Matt Ebb]

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 6:41 AM, Martin Poirier <theeth at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> First of all, huge thanks to Theeth for custom alignment.
>> This has had a big benefit for modeling and rigging (for me
>> personally)
>> and of course, some wishes/suggestions for discussion:
>
> I'm very glad someone found that useful. :)

Me too, I was using it yesterday to edit a mesh that was pretty
orthogonal, but was rotated within its obdata so that the local axes
were misaligned with the actual angles in the model. Just select a
face on normal mode, custom orientation, boom! Very nice.

One thing that I don't like is having to open up that huge panel to
use it. I suppose it's useful if you've got loads of orientations you
need to store, but most of the time I've been using it, it's just been
one at a time, as a temporary thing. The other thing with the panel is
that it's not very discoverable at all, it's in a quite different part
of the UI, under a heading that doesn't really make sense ('View' menu
is about how things are displayed in the 3D view, it's not about
editing).

It would be nice/better if, at the top of the header menu (that
contains local, global, view, etc) there was a separator and then
additional options there to add or clear all orientations. That way
you wouldn't have to use the panel, and it would be a more logically
accessible.

It would be something like

Add New
-------------
View
Local
Global


or if you have an orientation already set up:

Add New
Clear Custom
-------------------
MyCustomOne
-------------------
View
Local
Global


> >From the header menu:
> Object -> Transform -> Align to Transform Orientation  (Ctrl-Alt-A)
>
> It's in the 2.46 release logs, at the very bottom: "Align to Transform Orientation"

What I would also like is 'Apply Transform Orientation'  - similar to
Ctrl A, but baking the object's axes to the transform space, not
global space. There is the 'Axis Orientation Copy' script that kinda
does the same thing, but it's very limited, and of course not
integrated nicely with the other transform options, especially in the
UI.


And as one final request (though I have no idea how it should be
implemented - any ideas?) It's really like to be able to rotate a
transform orientation - like rotating the manipulator.

It's quite often that I'll select a group of faces with the 'normal'
manipulator on, and while the Z axis is pointing nicely along the
normal, the X and Y axes are kinda arbitrary and not lining up with
anything useful in the selection. It'd be really cool to be able to
then rotate that manipulator around its the Z axis so the X and Y axes
are pointing in useful directions, which I can then use. I know this
sounds pretty obscure and maybe not worth the trouble, but some way to
do this would have been useful for me a number of times.

cheers,

Matt