Gumball handle obscures point in orthogonal line

The gumball scale handle is really annoying when working with horizontal lines, because I can’t select the left point immediately. If I want to click select the left point, I have to click select the right point first before I get to move the left one. Is there a way around this other than disabling the gumball alltogether?


Window selection…

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And in terms of changing the gumball itself? There doesn’t appear to be an option for it.

The gumball scale handle is there because of the bounding box. You could make a gumball which has the scale handles scaled to 0

I’m using F3 to toggle the gumball which I find would also work well in this situation

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You can temp. switch off the handles with a macro:
-_GumballSettings _Handles _ScaleHandle=Off _EnterEnd

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What about adding an option to offset the scale handle [From the bounding box on the axis]
Something like the bellow mockup perhaps…?
Yes we can manually move it when needed. But it is also more clicks, having it just out of the way would be faster and should be good in most situation.

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@Akash maybe GumballScaleSetting Relative?

Anyway, having the scale handles out of the bounds of the object will make it impossible to scale things exact.

Hi @Gijs
I was thinking of it just as a UI display aid, same thing as it is now with the Plane handle [the scale calculation location stays at the BB ]

and probably a minus value to the offset [in] will be more useful.

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in v8 you can always double click a handle and move it a bit-

Hi Kyle, Yes I know that…

But I feel it would be better to move it to the BB when needed.

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In Rhino 14, you can hower the mouse pointer over the scale handle for a user-defined amount of milliseconds (1500 ms or so), then its size will automatically increase to a larger size (also customizable, but this time in pixel size, such like 40x40 pixels), giving you the ability to click inside to select an obscured control point without the risk to scale the object. If you do nothing and just move the mouse pointer away, the scale handle returns to is default size. An alternative option is to set the scale handle to automatically hide instead of scaling it up upon mouse howering.

P.S. Keep in mind that this is only possible in Rhino 14 and up. I come from the future to tell you about it’s capabilities compared to is older brother, Rhino 8. :sunglasses:

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In fact I forgot that ScaleHandle works as a toggle, so you can also use:
-_GumballSettings _Handles _ScaleHandle _EnterEnd

anyway, I wonder why you did not mark @martinsiegrist’s suggestion as solution?

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I was also thinking about something like that, where you start scaling away from the line, but then the line end jumps to the mouse cursor for accurate scaling, without obstructing a point in this case.

I left it open, because the discussion was still ongoing. If you could log the gumball proposal above, I’ll mark the solution.

Offsetting the scale handle sounds interesting but it would always have to be scaled away beyond the bounding box…

And then someone will come and say: hey what about if my plane handle is on top of the end point of a 45° degree line? Can it be offset to a place where nothing is below it?

image

Anyone else noticed how in some situations a plane handle is on top of an annotation and when you double click you get into the annotation popup?

@martinsiegrist hi
The Plane handle is located away from the GM center in screen pixels distance. So if you zoom in/out a bit, you’d get it out of the way. While Scale handles are positioned on the BB [zooming does not change their position]

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I know I can zoom in or out :wink:

To be honest I think it’s much quicker to either toggle the gumball or press F10 to focus on control points…

But that’s extra work — while the gumball can be redesigned to circumvent that. :upside_down_face:

I never use smooth dragging, I deactivate the snaps.

So just to clarify, your goal is to have the left control point of the curve selected and the gumball set to smooth dragging?

I actually need the snaps, so I want to be able to just click select the left point in a horizontal line and move it with the gumball rather than window select it (because of the extra mouse movement back to the gumball).

Are you on the right topic @martinsiegrist?