Decals - tune up needed?

Rhino PaperCuts
21

I like this idea, it actually makes sense.

22

Decals are now ready for another round of discussion. There have been some major improvements to the workflow.

23

http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-28444

24

Small question… is the arrow direction of the widget backwards or am I misunderstanding what this direction means?

25

It has to do with the direction of the normals. If the normals match the arrow direction, the decal will show.

26

I see, I was thinking this was the direction the decal projects at the model. Maybe the ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ choices when setting up the decal need to be renamed to make this more clear.

27

The workflow is overall much improved with decals. I’d like to see a maintain aspect ratio option though and filed this request…
http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-28458

28

On the cylindrical decal widget, I noticed a couple of things -

  • there are a lot of points that change the diameter- I can see how this might be useful in that the opposite side of the cylinder stays put but it seems like too many- one more prominent handle to change diameter might be more useful and less confusing, unless anchoring one side is really important.
    Edit: I’ve been messing with this a bit more- @johnc, the cylindrical controls are really very hard to use. Apart from the above, there needs to be some way to constrain to the image aspect ratio.

  • in general, there are too many points and no indication of where they are in space- they all draw on top and look the same so in many views there is no way to tell what is going to happen when you drag one.

  • the axis points, top and bottom, can only move vertically as far as I can see, but they go through the motions of being moved any old way. I’d prefer they were constrained throughout the process if they are constrained in the end - e.g. Gumball arrows that are perp to the axis should not move the points.

  • Undo on any point edit on the decal widget does not redraw the points as they were- they stay in the edited positions.

  • I don’t see a way in the UI to turn off the decal widget. Esc works.

  • I’d make adding a decal the same (+ symbol in the list) as for textures and materials.( I see John C’s comment about this being hard to do is this dialog - OK- I don’t know of it is worth any particular level of effort, but to me it seems quite odd.)

still poking…

-Pascal