Gumball Wishes for V6

It would be useful to have a gumball mode for “Align to View”. I have a script for this which gives me a good starting point, I usually only need to adjust the rotation once from there instead of three times if starting from aligned to c-plane, but the script needs to be summoned with every new selection, and it forces a view reset which is jarring. (Not a new request but would be nice to see implemented in V6, from Dec 14 Rhino 6 Wishlist - Gumball “Align to View” Mode)

For consistency’s sake, when working in planar views I wish the gumball numeric input windows for rotation were the same as the standard rotation command, by which I mean relative to the view positive numbers are always counter-clockwise and negative always clockwise. As is I always have to check the display to see which way the arrows point before I input the number. (Also not a new problem Does Rotate in Gumball work backwards?) I suppose there is a logic for this depending on whether the axis arrow is pointing toward the view or away, but from a user perspective it just feels like an inconsistent and unhelpful UI.

Hi Mark - would you want the gumball to be oriented so that the view-plane is the reference plane: X to the right, Y up, Z pointing back at you out of the vieport? Should the gumball origin be in the center of the view (this can be handy, I’ve found) or on the center of the object(s)’ bounding box as usual?

Rotation direction is based on the circle and its normal - the positive circle is counter clockwise if you are looking back toward the gumball origin from the + rotation axis.

-Pascal

Pascal,
Yes, exactly the same as if you set the c-plane to view and then set the gumball to c-plane. I hadn’t thought about the concept of setting the gumball to the view center, that might be useful in some cases, but I would default to keeping the gumball centered on the object.

I understand the logic of rotation, but I would prefer a view based convention so that I could enter a numeric input without first checking whether my view looked like this:

Or this:

Because I often adjust the gumball orientation by ctrl-dragging the rotation arcs to get an arrow pointing in the direction I want, I don’t think of it as having any concrete relationship to the object or world coordinates. So its kind of meaningless to me to think in terms of the circle normal as that is not tied to anything except the gumball itself. Usually I use the rotate command if I want to snap the center to a specific point and gumball rotate if I want to use the object BB, and it just seems to me it would be simpler if they were both view based.