Problems with Soft Edit

So I was talking with a guy that uses 3DS Max and he was showing me how he can soft select the vertices of a mesh and then transform them in a smooth manner. I looked and found in rhino that there are a few soft edit tools. There are two things not working for me. #1 Gumball disappears so when I go to transform the selected geometry, I don’t have much control. #2 There are a lot of steps in these soft edit operations- how can I edit my srf/mesh in a sort of rapid fire mode where I pick and move with the same settings until I want to stop or change the settings?

I think you’re talking about what’s called proportional editing. Where you’d move one point and adjacent points move at a lesser amount proportional to the distance from the grabbed point. This is very common in polygonal modelers but in NURBS modelers it’s a different story. I’ve been asking for it internally for a while and we have something started for use on meshes but nothing for NURBS control points unfortunately. The only option for those is the deformation tools like SoftEdit, CageEdit, Bend etc. under the Transform menu. These don’t work in the direct Gumball click and drag way however. You can do a lot with them regardless though so post a model and describe what you want to do if you’d like more input.

For future reference here’s the feature request for proportional editing in Rhino… RH-7924

Check out the Dragmode and DragStrength commands for fine-tuning editing controls. Also maybe SetPt, moveUVN and Weight.

Gumball doesn’t disappear when selecting control points…

Better control for soft editing NURBS surfaces would be highly appreciated.

I can’t believe you are working on it for Mesh modeling but not for NURBS.
At the end of the day the control points of a NURBS surface form some kind of mesh too, so mathematically moving those control points shouldn’t be any different than the vertices of a mesh.
Norbert

Sorry, I agree that it would be useful with NURBS modeling. I’m not sure now if we’ll even be able to do it for meshes after chatting with @mikko about it. We may need to make some changes that make it harder to do if not impossible.