On 3/8/07, Gail Banaszkiewicz <gbanaszk@...1686...> wrote:
Inkscape is a 2D drawing tool. However, very often it is used to draw 3D objects. It would be very cool to have more support from the program for doing that, instead of just drawing everything manually. I think this is a really cool idea. DRAW has a few tools that you may be thinking of such as Extrude and Perspective. However, I must say that the UI isn't the greatest, probably in large part because this functionality has been around for a long time. I have attached a screenshot of each tool in action on a simple rectangle to see if this is the kind of thing you were picturing.
I'm not entirely sure, as screenshots are static and don't show all the options, but it seems to me that it's not quite what I had in mind. Perspective distortion of an arbitrary path is something we very definitely need (and we even have an effect for that though it's rather flakey and inconvenient). Extrude is also nice, especially for text headings. But they are both effects that, most often, just add a 3D aspect to existing objects. They are closer to the "eye candy" category than to real work tools. What I envision is a tool for a draftsman, a technical illustrator; something that lets you draw entire scenes in one common perspective easily.
Drawing with the 3D box tool gives you a box with 4 handles on the box (3 for changing its dimensions and one in the center for dragging it in 3D) and 3 more perspective handles. If some dimension has a vanishing point, its perspective handle is (for example) diamond; if that dimension has infinity vanishing point, the corresponding handle is round (and can adjust only direction from the center). Dragging box handles without Shift moves them in X/Y plane, with Shift in Z. All very simple and obvious - you can drag anything anywhere and see the result at once. If multiple boxes selected and their perspectives are compatible, the corresponding handles snap together and dragging them affects everything selected.
And then, this tool can be used as a generic "definer" of the perspective. You can take one such box, copy its perspective, and paste on other boxes. Or project a path onto a side of the box ("perspective envelope"). Or apply the box's perspective and bounds to any object to extrude it. Or subdivide the box into subboxes to create 3D grids. Or even enable ellipse and other drawing tools to draw in the currently selected box's perspective.
That's just some of the ideas. The main point of my proposal is, let's do the fundamentals right, before we do any eyecandy. And in the world of 3D, a basic 3D box is as fundamental as you can get. Everything else stems from it or can be defined by it.