On Feb 6, 2008 6:26 PM, Joel Holdsworth <joel@...1709...> wrote:
Maybe that would be ok. Actually it could be quite a nice workflow: e.g Select 4 nodes with the node edit tool, click fillet, context toolbar shows fillet controls allowing radius to be selected numerically etc., and at the same time a set of handles on thin-blue-line-previews of the fillets allowing the radius to be chosen interactively.
Then what? I suppose we could put a button marked "Apply" on the toolbar to finalise the geometry change caused by the tool. And another button marked "Cancel" that will back out to normal node editing. So in this scheme, the fillet toolbar would become a sort of modal sub-bar.
No, any apply/cancel buttons on the toolbar are out of the question. I propose the following fully interactive approach:
- the toolbar in fillet mode contains a "Snap at:" spinbutton with units
- the current snap-at value is visualized as a helper circle of that radius filleting each selected node; if it is 0 (default) no helper circle is drawn
- the filleting is done by dragging away from any of the selected nodes, interactively changing the radius (all other selected nodes get filleted by the same radius), and it will snap to the predefined snap-at circle when close to it.
This way, you can get both free interactive filleting and easily fillet by the specified radius, all without any unnatural modalness or buttons on the toolbar.