In the Rhino WIP we’ve made the gumball align to the control polygon when control points are selected in object mode. This alignment matches the directions used by the MoveUVN panel. When the “UVN gumball” is manipulated each selected control point will move along its respective control polygon directions or extensions. The new alignment makes adjusting the flow of a surface easier without having move back and forth between the view and a panel. The gumball UVN directions can also help maintain G1 continuity between surfaces while adjusting the speed of the transition.
Selection Behavior:
The gumball will align to the UVN directions of the most recently singly selected control point.
When window selecting or double clicking a row of control points a base control point for alignment will be automatically chosen.
Moving the UVN aligned gumball to another selected control point will realign the gumball.
If a non control point object is selected the gumball will revert to its normal object mode alignment.
If you turn PointsOn for a SubD or mesh and select a control point the gumball will align to its UVN directions. For SubDs and Meshes that’s currently just the normal. I’m guessing you want some UV directions. That’s a bit trickier. Does some other software figure that out correctly for you or how do you expect it to work?
I did find a bug with window select when testing this. I opened RH-88957 to get that addressed.
As I mentioned many times in many topics, the Gumball urgently needs secondary “Drag strength” handles, or, alternatively, activating the “Drag strength” speed by dragging/rotating/scaling via the right mouse button instead of the left one.
The 1st approach will automatically bring the “Drag strength” pop-up panel, so that the user could adjust the secondary speed through the slider.
The 2nd approach may do the same, or even can eliminate the need to bring the “Drag strength” window and instead use a preset reduced speed that could be changed from the Gumball options. This will leave a more clean viewport that will not be occupied by the “Drag strength” window. The default secondary drag strength could be anything between 2 and 5. Most of the time, a value of 3 is a good number for fine adjustment.
Since the 2nd approach uses the RMB, there is no need for adding secondary arrow handles to the gumball. The beauty of this approach is that the user is not required to press any icon to activate the drag strength, because he or she just need to press the RMB instead of the LMB. It’s the perfect way to take advantage of a 3d mouse and work fast with the regular mouse.
Also, check this post to read more about another proposal regarding the Gumball. The user must be able to choose whether the regular Gumball (not in Object mode) will utilize the RMB either as a “Drag strength” function or to temporarily switch to the opposite type of Gumball dragging (smooth or snappy).
Personally, I would love to be able to use the RMB on the regular Gumball for Snappy dragging, whereas the RMB on the new UVN Gumball object mode will use a drag strength with a value of 2 (adjustable from the Gumball’s settings; no need to bring the “Drag strength” pop-up window all the time).
Honestly, the best way to implement both of these functionalities simultaneously is to develop Super Gumball, i.e. Gumball on steroids, so that the users could opt to activate the secondary handles for Move, Rotate and Scale individually. The latter means that the user must have the freedom to activate only the secondary handles for Move, or only for Rotate, or only for Move and Scale. You get the idea. Some users may not like the crowded look of the Super Gumball, this is why it’s essential to offer a way to hide the unnecessary handles.
Also, don’t forget to allow use of “Drag strength” values lower than 1, because the current lower limit prevents a fine adjustment on tiny objects or distant objects. At least make it possible to set a value ot 0,1 or 0,01.
So I’m 100% with you that drag strength and the gumball don’t play nice together. Having to close the drag strength panel or slide it back to 100 to do a full strength drag, or do any up and down adjustment is tedious and has lots of clicking around. You also don’t know what percentage you need till you start dragging. Unfortunately, I don’t think adding additional handles to the gumball resolves this and would be a bit of a band aid at the cost of making the gumball very cluttered. One thing I’ve thought about, and maybe this is a crazy, is if we hook the drag strength up to the mouses horizontal wheel? So while you’re dragging you can dynamically adjust the strength?
I use a Logitech MX Master 3 and the horizontal scroll wheel is on the thumb. That way as you’re dragging you could adjust the strength using your thumb on that scroll wheel.
Not UV directions, but the control polygon directions, which can be just 2 as well as much more than 4 directions.
Please do not forget about SubDs … they really should get more love from McNeel.
If more points are selected, only a single gumball is shown? That seems a bad UI/UX choice.
With the “Show widgets” in the MoveUVN you can have multiple gumballs at once:
Out of 7 points, only 5 are selected, dragging will apply transformation only to those points.
But this needs to have all the gumballs active all the time (indeed, put a limit of… 50 grips? for start…)
(And as Bobi wrote in the other thread, the optional fall-off thing is a must-have..)
Anyway, forget about the MoveUVN command and push all the good stuff on the standard gumball.
Keeping those directions consistent is the tricky part and it falls apart very quickly if there are more than four edges. Do you have an example of this working elsewhere or what you expect to happen in Rhino I can take a look at?
Is manually moving the gumball every time a good solution? Imho not.
Make a limit for that, over 100? 50? grips, then show just one. But when you select a bunch of grips, it should totally be doable. Please…
I feel you!
I personally tried myself doing so, the hard part for me was the total lack of SubD topology (with meshes it’s SO much simpler…) SubD were totally un-manageable from rhinocommon… but it was months ago!
I really hope and expect there will be good news about this matter.
As someone that works and live with Rhino, no.
But it’s 2025, and I expect other software have this function at least from… 20 years ago?
I did make a video with some example:
This should’ve been a feature for Rhino 8 on release day… arguably even since 7’s…
Regarding other software, I don’t use any but I think someone posted an example some time ago of a SubD model where a vertex was possible to drag along the edges.
Hi all! Thanks for the time you take into making these suggestions. I think we can all agree that Drag Strength requires a revamp, especially now that the Gumball has a UVN mode. To keep things clean, I’ve split this post, so that we can focus on the Gumball UVN suggestions for this post.
We will do a deep dive into a new look for Drag Strength. We will consider all these suggestions as well as many other constraints that come into play when redesigning anything in Rhino. We’ll keep you posted!
Just a thought: look at softimage, the best modeling interface to have ever existed. It was always fast, easy to understand and switching from points to spans and adding and subtracting from selections was a no brainer. All with no stupid gumball crapping up the screen.
Hi @René_Corella - The Gumball arrows will align to the UVNs of the first control point selected. If you select additional points, the Gumball won’t change, since it’s still positioned on that initial selected ctrl pt, however, dragging the arrows (located on the first ctrl pt), will move each point in its own UV direction.
You are comparing a 3d mesh modeling program with NURBS modeling program where a fine tuning of control points in the microns range is essential. This is the reason why “Drag strength” is needed in NURBS modeling programs. This is not the case with the 3d mesh programs.
These UVN handles sometimes are moved with normal speed, other times with “Drag strength” speed, meaning that both types of arrow handles must be visible simultaneously for an instant access.
The distance between the normal handles and drag strength handles should be adjustable from the options. A value of 0 will turn off the drag strength handles.
Not yet; however, it’s my fault and didn’t explain myself. I was genuinly interested in knowing the reason(s) behind that particular part of the gumball behavior.
*Edit:
I guess I can answer my own question (kind of, partially) after all by comparing with the Fusion360 form-editing manipulator.
Here three points of the “SubD control polygon” are selected together and the manipulator is automatically at the center point of this selection, but that’s because the selection filter is set to “selection space”:
If I switch to the filter “Local per entity”, then things look like this new UVN Gumball feature, where the manipulator remains on the first selected vertex:
Then the actual geometry deformations are different, so it all makes sense.
I guess the reason behind this behavior doesn’t matter anymore because in Rhino WIP I can just make sure my first selected point is ‘the center one’ when possible
I guess you are completely unfamiliar with Softimage. It was NURBS. It had the same precision as Alias did at the time. It also had an interface that was user friendly and organized, unlike Alias. It had soft selections and ways to move NURBS points relative to the surface and globally, singlely and in groups, very intuitively AND with increment adjustability using all three mouse buttons and toggles within the interface.
FYI, It didn’t even have support for polygon modeling until later in it’s life.
The point is that before everyone got on the stupid gumball bandwagon there were better ways to modify and move NURBS points.
Your guess about me is wrong. XSI was primarily used for polygonal modeling in the film industry, video games industry, etc, note than 20 years ago. It had a Gumball. Its NURBS capabilities were super bad. The only other program with worse NURBS capabilities was 3ds Max. Both were not good for NURBS modeling.
Alias relies on using 3 mouse buttons, so button is assigned to moving the objects in one of the main directions: XYZ for objects and UVN for control points.
