Elwin Estle escribió:
Feature idea.
I have no idea how hard this would be to implement, or even if it is possible. But it would be an interesting effect.
In Blender, you can take a mesh and add what is called a "lattice" modifier to it. The mesh is usually fairly complex from a face count standpoint. The lattice is usally simpler. It is just a "box" that surrounds the mesh with a few subdivisions.
What is neat is, that if you grab one of the verts in the lattice and move it, it acts like a sort of "bezier" control handle for multiple verts in the mesh, so by moving one vert in the lattice, you can deform a more complex mesh in a controlled fashion.
Could this sort of an idea be adapted to Inkscape? Say you have some text, you convert it to a path, maybe add some nodes. Then you surround it with a box that has a user definable number of nodes per side. If you grab one of those nodes, and drag it, it reacts with a certain number of nodes in the text path, dragging them like a magnet.
With something like this, you could flex and bend an object however you wanted.
If I follow you correctly, this could indeed be very useful, not for a single path "node sculpting" but rather for multiple selections/groups of paths. For instance, in the example you gave, suppose you have a text line composed of several characters each a path and grouped together, if a "latice-like" tool was available in Inkscape, then you could simply put a box around the group of objects and select the number of nodes for that bounding box, then simply use "node sculpting" in the bounding box to the effect that the individual nodes of the actual paths to be modified accordingly, that would be one heck of a way to get for instance wavy text without resorting to text-on-path (creating first the wave path, then make the text follow such path), though text-on-path for this particular application is a better solution, for multiple path editing is not, suppose that the before mentioned text were characters of different sizes and shapes (different "font faces") then a tool like this would be very useful. It would be like "mass node sculpting". I think it would actually be very nice, IMO.