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).
Hopefully you will get rid of that in favor of something that can be changed any time by dragging a handle or changing a "thickness" setting in the toolbar.
Dragging handles is implemented in the most recent version. :) Only the question of how many of them we want and if their movement should be constrained to certain axes or unconstrained by default still needs to be settled. Comments are appreciated.
More generally I guess I still don't get why you'd want to have a 3D box tool. It's basically an extrusion tool that happens to only extrude rectangles. Why not make something that's capable of extruding anything and applying a perspective transform to it? Like the question that was on the list earlier today -- about extruding fonts. This would be a useful tool for doing that, if it weren't restricted to extruding only rectangles.
See Bulia's original proposal in the wiki for some comments, in particular the second question in the Mini-FAQ:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Googles_Summer_Of_Code#3D_Tool
Basically, I think the 3D box tool is certainly a very helpful thing for people in the realm of technical designing (alone because 3D boxes can be used as a sort of "skeleton" for more complicated shapes that are then drawn by hand). But as Bulia writes, a 3D box is first and foremost the fundamental building block of any 3D scene. And imho it is a very convenient way of specifying a certain perspective. Once you have a means of defining perspectives, these can be used to extrude any kind of objects, draw objects in tilted planes, and many, many more things; the wiki and the accompanying website of the tool (see the link in my last email) list a random and certainly incomplete collection of further ideas. The implementation of the tool contains a separate C++ class for 3D perspectives which can (and is supposed to) be used as a basis to implement all this, although such advanced functionality won't be part of this SoC project.
/Max