[tuhopuu-devel] Drag transform woes

[Matt Ebb]

On 24 Jan 2005, at 5:17 AM, Martin Poirier wrote:

>   Log:
>   - RMB Drag now repeats the last transformation (as suggested on the 
> blender.org forum). Defaults to grab if there was no previous.

Whoa. I just came back from some time away and gave this a try - I hate 
to be a negative nancy, but this is really the wrong way to go. I was 
doing some work with this just after the original commit, and it was 
just beautiful - really smooth workflow, and it actually made my tablet 
useful, hooray! But this commit is a big step in the wrong direction.

The way it was before has a prefect application for a dragging metaphor 
- a really 'concrete' natural kind of action, that benefited perfectly 
from that 1:1 mapping of mouse to movement. It was really intuitive, 
the drag and drop metaphor is really well known and it acted just like 
almost every other app and OS.

This sort of thing should be a nice quick simple tool (for tweaking), 
that's natural to use. It doesn't need to be, and shouldn't be 
overburdened with this complicated functionality, which is already 
behind hotkeys anyway. The great thing about Blender is that all the 
transformations are right there where and when you want them under the 
hotkeys, available at all times. This is going towards the 'mode' type 
transformation like in Maya etc. where you press a hotkey or button or 
something to go into, say, 'move move' which only gives you the ability 
to transform. This blocks the other transformations so from within 
there, you can only move and have to switch to the rotate mode or 
whatever, and not access it immediately.

This kind of style is slow and clunky in comparison to Blender, but 
what's even worse with this current CVS implementation is that there's 
absolutely no indication of which mode you're in, visual or otherwise! 
It makes for a lot of frustrating guesswork and extra mental burden to 
attempt to remember unnecessary things, for what should just be a 
simple straightforward task.  What on earth has remembering the last 
button I pressed got to do with the process of expressing something in 
3D? I can't count the number of times I swore when I was attempting to 
model, then tweaked some settings elsewhere, came back and drag, and 
*#$^#% it goes and does something completely wrong instead. I had to 
compile with old transform again just to get work done!

I *really really really* hope you reconsider this commit - it'll both 
confuse the hell out of newbies, and give others like me stress ulcers!

Cheers and sorry for the whinge!

Matt
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