after i talked with other cg artists about blender (i use Blender, they use 3dsMax) i started creating a feature proposal: http://www.neeneenee.de/blender/features/
It is just a beginning, just a proposal not a law.
hope this is inspiring.
when you constrain movement to an axis in grab mode [or scale mode and stuff] with either the middle mouse button or the x,y,z keys the axis does show up [it has for a couple releases]
as for the viewport thing you mention, I think it would end up with a "camera" like command to rotate the view, I would find it annoying, I don't usually need to constrain rotation of the camera to one axis [and if I do I would usually be okay simply using front/side/back/top/right/bottom views]
though, I think there should be a view rotation mode which doesn't allow the camera to be flipped over [like the blender camera controls in wings3d]. People think turntable should work this way [iirc it never has]
solidify sounds a lot like intrude does in wings3d [except it doesn't create holes on selected faces]
personally I don't use the intrude function [my objects have been too complex for it to be useful to me]
[oh, and you can do what you describe with: shift+d [enter, without moving anything], alt+s and a negative value, then [optionally] flip normals]
With rotating the perspective view around an axis i do not mean camera view.
Solidify is more as you discribed with
[oh, and you can do what you describe with: shift+d [enter, without moving anything], alt+s and a negative value, then [optionally] flip normals]#
If there where holes in the object or it is a tube or a half sphere it generates the side faces too.
I know that the axis is shown when you move along it but:
- when your object is located at the origin you do not see that because the axis is located where the standard axis is
- if your object not located at the origin you have two axis and sometimes it is good to know along which you movng your object
As far as the solify goes, I would suggest modifying the technique above to use "E" instead of "SHIFT+D":
1) Select verts
2) Select "Extrude" (press enter without moving anything)
3) Select "Shrink/Fatten Along normals" (move until the thickness is as you want it)
The extrude above will generate all required faces.
Here is an image that I just created using this method. The starting object was a half UV Sphere with a hole cut into it.
ok,
but think about speed (one step instead of some steps and the problem that you must think about how to do it without solidify) and think on complex objects
So i think a solidify function would be usefull.
As you can see at the bottom of the chapter other 3d software has these functions too.
Yes, I agree that it would be a nice to be able to cut out the extra step. I just wanted to point out a way it can be done at this moment (in case you needed to do it and we're not sure how).
Thanx for your comments, it was interesting to see how it is possible now. But as you wrote you need some steps more for solidify and you can do this just outside or inside but not from center.
The workflow you suggest for booleans doesn't fit at all in the UI. It's quite standard to have two (or more) object selected and have the Active object work on the Selected object(s).
Martin
Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.
- John Lennon
@theeth
I know that and any time i use boolean (that is not often because the bad results) i do not know which object i must select first and which i must select last.
That's why i suggested this workflow because so you can abort without modifing the mesh if you have selected the wrong object first.
