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Axis constraints? Vertex snapping?


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So coming to DarkRadiant from Blender is a strange experience. Sometimes when I'm trying to resize a room after it has been formed, I have a tendancy to move my mouse slightly off course and lose a wall. In Blender, I can constrain my movement to a single axis so as long as the mouse is moving in a general direction, the object goes in a straight line. When working with patches, I find when I'm trying to move a vertex along against a wall in the 3d view, it sometimes moves up, down, towards me, and away from me, when all I want to do is move it left to right. Ortho view is no better as I sometimes have too many vertexes on the same line and have trouble selecting a specific one. If there was a way to do this in DarkRadiant, I haven't found it yet. I also found myself missing vertex snapping when working with patches. This is where you select a vertex, constrain it to an axis, and select another vertex to line it up with. So if I had my vertex lined up against the wall where I wanted, I could line up the vertex below along the x and y so they were perfectly on top of one another, but still separated by the same z distance. Finally, it would be nice to select two vertexes and have them meet up at the same spot. This is useful when you want two patches to line up with each other perfectly. Again I found myself fighting with the ortho view because I had all the vertexes from two different patches all filling up my front and side views.

 

Sometimes a picture is better:

Vertexproblems.png

Taurus philosophy:

Give me a hammer and tell me I have 6 hours to break up a 2 inch thick layer of ice. As soon as you walk away I'm going to use some hot water and salt so I can take a nap for the remaining 5 and a half hours. Taureans hate wasting energy and if there's a more efficient way to do something they will find it.

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A few general tips are:

 

* sort your stuff into layers, and hide everything you don't need

* you can select vertices in the 3D view, too. Press SHIFT and plus drag the mouse around what you want to select. Or just click them with shift pressed.

* you can "selectively deselect" things. Select a few vertices, then SHIFT + drag the mouse around a vertex you don't want, so it gets deselected

* move the vertices with the keyboard in the orthoview, presst ALT + LEFT, RIGHT etc. This has more control and moves vertices by grid-steps

* tow line vertices up, constrain to the grid. Select two vertices, select a coarse grid (7 or 8), then press CTRL+G. Afterwards, move both vertices together with the keyboard

 

Having axis-constraints and "merge vertices" would be nice, but I don't think this is implemented or will, tho.

 

Hope this helps!

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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The 3D view is where the problem is. I could be looking at the vertex dead on with X going left-right, Y going front-back, and Z going up and down, click on the vertex I want, move my mouse upwards and still have it wibble a bit along the Y/X. It can get frustrating when you can see two vertexes that you want to line up in the 3D view, but they just won't go together, and you try to move them in ortho and you end up grabbing 5 others that happened to be on the same line. In Blender you just select two vertexes, hit Alt-M and a menu pops up that says "At First, At Last, At Center" In the case of two patches I don't really want to merge them but bring the vertexes to the same place. Constraining wouldn't be that hard either. Select your vertex in the 3D view, hold down or press a key (X, Y, or Z), and click and move your mouse. In Blender a white line appears on the vertex going in the direction of the axis when it's in constraint mode, a good visual aid when you are working in a 3D view. Pressing the corresponding key works like a toggle.

 

I guess I'll have a look at DR's source myself later tonight. Those patches just took way too long to stitch together compared to how fast I could have done the same thing in Blender. Adding the same functionality to DR would save me a lot of time, since I'm pretty much always working with vertexes in a 3D view.

Taurus philosophy:

Give me a hammer and tell me I have 6 hours to break up a 2 inch thick layer of ice. As soon as you walk away I'm going to use some hot water and salt so I can take a nap for the remaining 5 and a half hours. Taureans hate wasting energy and if there's a more efficient way to do something they will find it.

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Yes, I am sure that having axis-constraints would be a cool thing in DR - unfortunately, we don't have it :)

 

But maybe my post was a bit misleading. Here is how you do it:

 

* select the vertex in the 3D view (this is easiest if you want only one), OR in the ortho view. OR select a row in one of the ortho-views, then deselect the others in another view (like in the 3D view)

* once you have exactly the vertices you want, click onto one ortho view. then use ALT+LEFT, ALT+UP etc to move the vertix (it will move along the grid)

 

Likewise, if you want to move two vertices together (you cannot merge them, sorry for the misleading word):

 

* select both of them (via the method above)

* set the grid to a very coarse value by pressing "8"

* press CTRL-G (your two vertices snap together)

* now set the grid back (like with "4"), then move the vertices around with the keyboard

 

 

Granted, that is more cumbersome than it could be, but at least it will work, and it will make precise movements of the vertices (and snap them to the grid, which is important).

 

Hope that helps!

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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I understand what you are saying and I thank you for your advice, but that solution still sounds cumbersome as it requires me to switch around from 3D view to ortho, and switch from my mouse to the arrow keys. Personally I would prefer using wsad to the arrow keys when moving around in the 3D view. The arrow keys just feel unnatural to me. I've been studying C++ for years, but only recently have I gotten confident enough to dive into codebases. Thanks to visual C++ express, I'm learning at a rate I never dreamed possible. This problem is just the challenge I need right now to put all those years of studying to the test.

Taurus philosophy:

Give me a hammer and tell me I have 6 hours to break up a 2 inch thick layer of ice. As soon as you walk away I'm going to use some hot water and salt so I can take a nap for the remaining 5 and a half hours. Taureans hate wasting energy and if there's a more efficient way to do something they will find it.

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I was having the same problems yesterday. I couldn't find any better way than to individually move veritices & get them off the line and then select them together. Maybe we could request handling this better as a feature for the next version.

 

I thought you could constrain the axis by holding down shift while you're LMB-dragging the mouse; it constrains to the axis you first drag the mouse. That's how it works with brushes, e.g., if you're traslating them.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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I understand what you are saying and I thank you for your advice, but that solution still sounds cumbersome as it requires me to switch around from 3D view to ortho, and switch from my mouse to the arrow keys. Personally I would prefer using wsad to the arrow keys when moving around in the 3D view.

 

You can reassign any keyboard short cut in the menu under "Edit -> Keyboard Preferences". The "move things round" are named "SelectNudgeDown","SelectNudgeUp" etc. I tried it and remapped them to ALT+W, and W and that works (although some key then conflict with something else).

 

What does not work is setting them to "ALT+S", because this opens the Script menu.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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I thought you could constrain the axis by holding down shift while you're LMB-dragging the mouse; it constrains to the axis you first drag the mouse. That's how it works with brushes, e.g., if you're traslating them.

 

Thank you! That is exactly what I was looking for when dealing with brushes in the same manner. I would never have thought that hitting shift after clicking the mouse button did anything different. After reading your post I found it on the "Dark Radiant Controls" wiki page. The reason why I didn't find it before was because I was searching for the word "constraint", which is what it's called in Blender. It seems to also work in the 3D view, but it decides the axis based on the camera angle rather than true X, Y, or Z. It moved the brush in a straight line, but in ortho view, the brush was moving diagonally.

Taurus philosophy:

Give me a hammer and tell me I have 6 hours to break up a 2 inch thick layer of ice. As soon as you walk away I'm going to use some hot water and salt so I can take a nap for the remaining 5 and a half hours. Taureans hate wasting energy and if there's a more efficient way to do something they will find it.

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Thank you! That is exactly what I was looking for when dealing with brushes in the same manner. I would never have thought that hitting shift after clicking the mouse button did anything different. After reading your post I found it on the "Dark Radiant Controls" wiki page. The reason why I didn't find it before was because I was searching for the word "constraint", which is what it's called in Blender. It seems to also work in the 3D view, but it decides the axis based on the camera angle rather than true X, Y, or Z. It moved the brush in a straight line, but in ortho view, the brush was moving diagonally.

 

Aah, you have to press SHIFT after clicking the mouse? I think this should be definitely added with the word "constraint" to the wiki, I wasn't aware of that. Cool :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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