[tuhopuu-devel] Transform: feature or bug?

Martin Poirier theeth at yahoo.com
Sat Jan 29 05:08:46 CET 2005


--- Chris Want <cwant at ualberta.ca> wrote:

> 
> No offense -- I know you've put a lot of thought
> and work into this -- but I'm not crazy about this
> new
> behavior. I find it is slower to get what you
> want with this than with the old way, so what
> is the incentive to change it?

The reasoning goes a bit like this (that might sound a
bit formal, on purpose so I can reuse it later ;) ):

The previous behavior assumed a lot from the user:
1- That the orientation of the global space in regard
to the viewport was known.
2- In extensio, that the user knew what the 2D mouse
motion corresponded to in global space since pressing
MMB will constraint to the axis with the largest
motion.

While those are safe assumptions with aligned view
(top, front, side), it is often not the case with
rotated viewports and prespective.

Also, for some viewport orientations, it was
particularly hard to constrain to some axis with MMB
alone (then again, you have the X,Y,Z keys, but these
again assume orientation knowledge).

I think the current implementation addresses all those
issues:
1 & 2- It gives visual clues to the resulting
constraints.
3 - It enables easy constraining on the 3 axis
regardless of the orientation of the viewport.
Excluding constraints to the orthogonal axis with
aligned view, but the transformations were it would
actually do something (Rotate and probably Wrap)
already have that behavior by default.

However, I didn't want to have to sacrifice speed (not
too much anyway) to gain these.
- This is why I used a Click - hold/move - Release
motion. For quick motions, this is faster than click -
move - click.
- For aligned views, clicking MMB has the same
behavior as before.

Another thing is that this also helps with the
limitation of the X,Y,Z hotkeys which required a
second of thought (if you could remember the
orientation of the viewport) and trial-error if you
didn't by using visual clues, it essentially drops all
orientation awareness assumptions (which is good and
bad, but not requiring something doesn't mean you
shouldn't do it anyway).


I'd like to hear why you like the old one better. The
current design isn't set in stone, so...


> P.S. Transform in armature edit mode is buggy.
> If the 'IK' button has been pressed for a
> bone, part of the bone is left behind in
> grab mode ... it's really odd.

Good call. Frankly, I haven't touched the bones much
and the Edit Bones to TransData transformation wasn't
done by me (and, IIRC is basicly a straight copy/paste
of the old transform way without further thought) so I
can't garanty anything. Will have to look into that
(and Pose Mode too, obviously).

Martin


		
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