General Category > Ongoing Anim8or Development
Topo Tool
Hypure:
Tried the topo and knife out, I have been watching you guys working on it and WOW, very cool!
kreator:
--- Quote from: captaindrewi on January 20, 2016, 08:40:51 am ---Unfortunately that doesn't help when using the uv tool as you need both mmb and rmb for scaling the uv image etc.
Hopefully that will be sorted out eventually its always been a nightmare to use, no fine adjustment etc, its a bit haphazard eh?!
--- End quote ---
Steve:
OK I've done a lot of experimenting with various configurations. There's a danger of making the topo knife too complex for easy use if too many functions are added. In addition to the 9 possible tools (LMB/MMB/RMB)x(no-key/shift/ctrl) you have: Is the topoknife active or not? Was it a click-release or click-drag? Was the click on something on in empty space? Etc.
Therefore I've decided to limit the functionality to a set of actions that work well together:
LMB: Adds new vertex/edge i.e. the normal topoknife. Only cuts across a single face from the previous topo knife point.
LMB+Shift: Dissolve edge or point. Does not clean up since it's sometimes ambiguous to know what to clean-up. It's simple for the user to click again to do thins since it's just a repeated click.
LMB+Ctrl: "Floating" topo knife. Adds a new edge in space, or connects to an edge or point that's not on the same face. Attempts to auto-fill faces for holes with 6 or fewer edges.
RMB: If active, deactivate topo knife. If inactive, dragging moves highlighted point or edge in the plane of the screen.
RMB+Shift: If active, deactivate topo knife. If inactive, dragging moves highlighted point or edge in the points' normal directions.
RMB+Ctrl: If active, deactivate topo knife.
MMB: Nop.
nemyax:
The topo knife doesn't work across faces that touch the mirror plane. However, it turns out you can use the new Ctrl+LMB mode to work around this.
Steve, will there be standalone Dissolve and Collapse?
Raxx:
I don't have any complaints about the current button setup. A few other things, however:
LMB+Ctrl: When adding new faces, their normals are flipped opposite of what the connecting faces are.
LMB+Shift: I still think it needs to clean points when dissolving edges and the point has two edges remaining. It's simple, sure, to afterwards click on the point and dissolve it. But then multiply that by dozens of times per model vs one or two times needing the other scenario and you have the greater of two evils. Again, merging faces or implementing a standalone dissolve tool would take care of those couple other cases where cleaning isn't needed.
Picking Radius: This applies to the RMB-move for the topo knife and the move tool in fast select mode. The picking radius for points is much too small for comfort. In XSI (Blender and Wings3D have advanced picking as well), it begins picking the closest p/e/f at 80 pixels. Points get absolute priority (this is important!) when the mouse is around 12 pixels away from it. Edges get next priority over faces, at about 12 pixels distance as well. I know I've been harping about this before, but it makes for an extremely smooth and natural experience when modeling and I can't think of any reason not to have this level of picking. When testing this and previous builds with the topo tool, it's been something of a sore point for me.
As for picking when using LMB actions of the topo tool, 12 pixels with point priority would be fabulous. Even when doing small tests earlier, there have been times when I unintentionally made cuts right next to the points I was wanting to connect to, resulting in duplicate points I didn't discover until much later. If it had instead snapped to the points properly, I wouldn't have had to clean it up later by dissolving the edge and then dissolving the point. If the user needs cuts extremely close to other points, then zooming in and cutting, or making the chain of cuts or connecting edges and then sliding the points afterwords would suffice.
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