Dragging Objects

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

One thing which would be brilliant for the next version, would be the ability to disable the dragging of selected objects.

I draw models of things which are going to get built, everything has a proper place and generally the various bits meet or interface in quite important ways so there are absolutely no circumstances in which I want to drag something out of position and drop it in some alternative, arbitrary position.

If anything needs moving there is always a specific vector involved so the move command would, ideally for me be the only way of moving things, because then I would know that I have not accidentally dragged stuff out of position.

I expect you’ll say ‘well just don’t do it’, which is fair enough but; it is very easy to do accidentally; particularly if you click on one of the view command buttons (zoom, window etc…) and it doesn’t register, you then click and drag with the expectation of changing the view but find you are dragging something out of position – thank you for the ‘undo’ command! But I am never completely certain that I have not, at some time accidentally dragged a bit of the model out of position, which, obviously can have disastrous results for later modelling based on it.

It may be that my (rollerball) mouse is a bad clicker; but I can’t imagine that I’m alone in having this issue (I have changed mouse a few times but have always had this problem)

It is not a showstopper, I’ve sort of got accustomed to it over the years and don’t now find this sort of error very often.

But I’d have thought that a ‘disable’ option would be fairly straightforward to implement and it would, surely be welcome for anyone who uses your excellent software for any sort of engineering work.

2

There is a way to reduce the possibility of accidental dragging of objects by using the following setting:
“Rhino options > Mouse > Click and drag > Drag selected objects only”.

Just below that setting you can also alter the drag threshold, in pixels.

Another way to make sure your objects will be preserved at their desired position is to use “Named positions”. The good thing about “Named positions” is that it lets you save numerous states for position/rotation/scale of the objects and you can swap these at any time the way you want.
http://docs.mcneel.com/rhino/5/help/en-us/commands/namedposition.htm

3

You can set your “object drag threshold” (mentioned above) to a number larger than your screen resolution - I have mine set to 5000.

Philip

4

@Philip. That’s a good one, I hate accidental dragging, just changed mine as well :+1:

5

Thank you Philip that looks to have done the trick,

Bruce

6

Thanks for advice, have done drag selected objects only and wound the drag threshold right up and it looks as though this is what I’ve been hoping for.

Bruce

7

I use 3d connexion mouse to manipulate the camera view with my left hand, so with the right hand I use a regular mouse only for dealing with the usual modeling commands or when I need to actually move some objects (either by direct dragging, via the Gizmo or though the “Move” command).