Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[captaindrewi]

I also agree that MMb should either be minimised OR at least have an alternative.
I do have a MMB and wheel, but having been recently using An8 on someone elses laptop I found soo much functionality missing without MMb... Big one was unable to deselect things...
Trev

Would be nice to have an alternative key to act as mmb for laptops that don't have a mmb. As Trev has highlighted.
I have drawn attention to it before.

[nemyax]

Would be nice to have an alternative key to act as mmb for laptops that don't have a mmb.

The least-surprise approach would be to emulate MMB with both LMB and RMB clicked/held together, the way X Window does it in Unix-like systems.

[captaindrewi]

Unfortunately that doesn't help when using the uv tool as you need both mmb and rmb for scaling the uv image etc.[re functionality of laptops without built in mmb]
Sorry I'm interrupting the main subject matter of this topic.

[Trevor]

I should note that I do support MMB operations, clicking with the wheel is no problem, I only state that a long way is needed.

eg, to zoom, we use the wheel or Alt+MMB, if no wheel or MMB available you can still use View tool and Zoom.

So, to deselect things we need an alternative.



I like the Shift CTRL descriptions of alternate and similar operations. A third would be Ctrl+Shift as pressing both together is easy. So that gives the topo tool 9 operations all with the mouse. (I mean 12 oops)

I suppose another alternative to MMB is Ctrl+Alt+RMB (unless I missed something prior)
Now I know someone is going to say "Alt is Arc-Rotate", but Im specifying Ctrl First. This means that Ctrl alters the Alt key to no longer bring up the Arc-rotate and to instead start accepting MB's. This could also tally up Topo Tool mouse options to 13...
Normalx3, Shiftx3, Ctrlx3, Ctrl+Shiftx3 + Ctrl+Alt+LMB
Oh well, 13 goes with the halloween theme (yeah, I prefer the classic blue as you may have seen in the merge points discussion)

Trev

[nemyax]

A third would be Ctrl+Shift as pressing both together is easy.

Ctrl+Shift is reserved for temporary Select.

[Hypure]

Tried the topo and knife out, I have been watching you guys working on it and WOW, very cool!

[kreator]

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?!

[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.

[nemyax]

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.

In addition, after you've dissolved an edge, and a point with valency 2 has been left behind, it can become hidden by a face if you're working in shaded mode. You have to jump around for a new angle or switch viewport modes just to clean up. I also feel strongly that the cleanup should be automatic for this particular tool.

[Trevor]

It seems that the example you gave with perimiter shapes is probably a bad one.
In that example I agree with you that the perimiter should be unchanged (Option 1)

However it seems that the complaint centers around internal points, where a vertex is left laying co-planner to 2 other verticies and not connected by any other lines. So this case is

 IF Vertex connected to 2 other Verticies THEN
         IF Vertex is co-planner to Connected_Verticies THEN 
                 Remove Vertex
 ELSE do nothing

How does this sound to everyone?

Trev

[nemyax]

Trevor
Sounds like an unnecessary distinction. Most of the time in practice, the point you'll want cleaned up won't be collinear with the other two.

[nemyax]

The conventional behaviour of dissolve-with-cleanup is as in example 4:


But it's not very useful to show free-floating polygons as an example. You can only see the convenience when this happens in the middle of a mesh.

[Trevor]

Hmmm... can I just point out one problem/error with your example number 4.3, the 4 tris where you delete the line connecting the mid-top verticies, if you remove this you will not result in 4, but in only 1 triangle in the lower right.

If not then you yourself are also incuring special instances as an8 cannot just fill holes, but instead also has to draw a new line. An8 may not know that you want a new line to connect verticies 1 and 4...


Steve also mentioned the same problem with examples 2 and 3, how does an8 choose which tri to keep? It cant.


Trev