On 7/5/07, Maximilian Albert <Anhalter42@...173...> wrote:
Bill Baxter wrote:
Ok. Thanks for the explanation. That shift thing is very unintuitive.
Really? I thought it was the most obvious thing. First you need to draw the front face, but then when you are already in the process of drawing, some modifier is needed to tell the tool that we want to go along the Z axis now. I really can't see any significantly different way to create a box, but I'm confident that you will quickly get used to it after trying it a couple of times. What had you envisioned instead?
This is of course only for the intial drawing process. Once the box is
created it can certainly be resized by dragging handles (see below).
No, that doesn't work if you don't do the shift thing initially. So maybe it's just a bug. You get two handles that work, and a third one floating in space that moves diagonally but has no effect.
Anyway, compare with how arcs are created, for instance. You create an initial circle/arc by a click-drag-release, then you set the wedge angle you want by dragging on a handle. And the last arc angle is remembered by the tool. I think that is how the 3D box should work too.
As far as the goal of being able to specify perspective is concerned -- I'm a little unclear what the interaction is going to be like for creating vanishing points that are very far away, but not infinite. Say you want lines not to be parallel but converging just slightly, to a vanishing point that's, say, 5 screenwidths to the left. Sure you could enter in a numeric value to place the vanishing point, but that's not very intuitive. I think it would be more useful to provide an alternate click-drag operation for the vanishing point lines. Say Ctrl-drag on one of the vanishing lines changes the distance to the vanishing point by some inverse function like 1/(dx+k) where dx is the mouse motion and k is some constant. That's probably not the right function exactly, but anyway making it inverse means you can get to an infinite vanishing point with a finite amount of mouse dragging, in exchange for making it take infinite dragging to get to zero. But by the time you're close to zero you'll be within reach of the vanishing point for direct click and drag anyway, so that should be ok.
--bb