Gumball wish

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

If a gumball is active, but not visible in any viewport, is it really there?

Quite often I’ll select an object in one viewport and wonder where it is in another viewport, and the only way to find it is to zoom-extents or zoom-selected.

I’d love it if we had a special gumball handle in these situations that showed where the object was in relation to the viewport. For example in Top view, if the object was off to the left out of frame, a gumball arrow would show up at the edge of the Top viewport telling me the object was left of frame. And if I wanted to, I could grab that gumball arrow to drag that object into frame.

Would anyone else like something like this?

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Hi Andrew,

This reminds me a bit of how the compass widget works in Grasshopper. It’s the graphic in the lower right of the Grasshopper canvas that points to the components in the definition.

Do you mean moving the object or the camera when dragging this proposed location arrow? Currently, the gumball works on the selection not the camera. I personally use ZS for this functionality as you mentioned.

Hi Brian,
I mean moving the object into the current viewport without having to move the cameras. I also use ZoomSelected or Zoom Extents, but it would be nice not to have to do that sometimes.

(maybe I’m just being lazy…)

Hi Andrew- what I do in these cases is run RelocateGumball and click someplace convenient in the viewport.

-Pascal

Hi Pascal,
That’s a nice trick and will get me out of trouble for a lot of instances. Thanks.

The most common example is when I’m working somewhere in my scene and insert an object from another file. It would be great to keep all my viewports where they are and drag a gumball handle from the edge of frame to where i want it in the frame.

The way I do it now is to ZS, Move (Move From is somewhere near the selected object), ZP (to get back to my previous camera position) then Move To where I want it.

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