A temporary lock of the U or V directions during moving a control point with the Drag mode > Polygon tool via holding down Ctrl or Shift? In this situation, holding Ctrl will allow movement only along the U direction, while Shift will allow movement only along the V direction. This will help with avoiding the accidental movement to the other direction when the camera angle is too steep, or the camera is not that close, or the distance of movement is way too small to be done in the proper direction with the mouse. During U or V lock it will help to temporarily show the U or V letters next to the control polygon to tell exactly what’s the expected direction of allowed control point manipulation.
A temporary drag strength set at 10% while holding Ctrl or Shift during the aforementioned U/V lock of the moving direction? Again, this is done to allow the modeler to fine tune the control point(s) from other camera angles and with much greater precise than what the mouse allows. I know about the “Drag strength” slider, but it requires additional mouse clicks for every time the modeler wants to move the control point(s) at a different rate (or waste time with zoom-in of the camera for every occasion like this), while my idea is to speed-up the working process by having that built into the “Set drag mode > ControlPolygon” tool. Obviously, when someone is going to use the 100% drag strength (i.e. without holding down Ctrl or Shift), he or she will not need to fine tune the control point, nor it will be a problem to navigate the movement in the desired direction since full speed adjustments are done for greater distances.
Yes, it’s also shown after the 1st minute in the following video, along with a few other extremely useful tools in Alias:
Just playing around with Pascal’s script that has kind of similar ability, and it immediatelly made me feel nice. Check the U-direction icon.
This script significantly speeds up the work and must be mandatory tool in Rhino 7!!! If possible, with its own “Undo/Redo” stack while the command is still active.
Slightly unrelated - but a thought for improvement in the user interface of UVN drag mode for direct surface manipulation. The rotation aspect of the gumball is almost pointless, and only serves to get in the way. Thoughts? Or maybe it’s just me.
Those small arrow handles for UV dragging and shear dragging must be mandatory for Rhino 7 SR20 or later! They are one of the major advantages of Alias that make it so good for quality modeling.
The user must be able to change the type of dragging those arrow handles at any time, which is most convenient by adding a pop-up window that combines “Drag strengths” (an already existing pop-up tool in Rhino) with the ! _DragMode command , which unfortunately does not have its own po-up window. In this special pop-up window called “Control point modeling” the user could switch between the different drag models via single clicking, as well as be able to toggle whether a certain type of drag mode will be affected by the drag strength or not. Example:
Check the U-direction icon.
