Soft Edit Srf doesn’t even have the red/green arrows.
I’ve seen similar (and commented) on similar topics, just kind of makes the command seem unfinished in my eyes. I still advocate having UV also labelled on the arrows, in commands such as rebuild etc. Or even just make it optional per display mode, Yes/No for it in the same area where you can amend the UV Wire colours.
It was discussed so many times in the past years. I’m now using Rhino 7 and the lack of clear U and V markers still forces me to use Undo when the UV direction is unclear…
I’m aware of that command, but it only adds extra mouse clicks, along with opening a new pop-up window that takes a portion of the viewport. Having visible “U” and “V” letters next to the end of a surface that show up automatically upon triggering certain commands (such like “Rebuild surface UV”) is a much easier and convenient way to figure out the surface UV directions.
I’m colour blind* (like 8% of the male population in Europe, so every 12th man) and can’t even figure out the proper colour of the arrows. This is where simple black U and V small letters next to the surface edge (or next to the last of the arrows) would help immensely.
Along with “Rebuild surface UV”, there are various other commands that require the user to choose between U and V direction, such like “Rebuild surface” (where the user needs to see both U and V directions simultaneously), “Split” (splitting a surface with the “Isocurve” option from the command prompt) etc. Clear U and V letter indicators will make using there commands much more easier.
By the way, as we discussed in several other topics recently, in future Rhino releases the TAB key should be used to swap the U and V direction in some commands. These commands include: “Split” (again, by the “Isocurve” option), “Rebuild surface UV”, “Insert/remove a control point”, “Insert knot” and others.
PS: Since my colour blidness combines two types, I have a very limited perception of coloured objects that are too small or thin, such like the red and green arrows that appear during the “Rebuild surface UV” command. The problem increases when the red or green are lying on a grey background, because in this situation my eyes see dark halos around the thin red and green arrows. I have a better chance to figure out what’s the colour if it has a much larger area - this is related to the eyes that need more light information to distinguish the different wave length for each colour. For the World axis in Rhino’s viewport I changed the colours to normal red, green and blue (255, 0, 0 / 0, 255, 0 / 0, 0, 255 respectively) and also made them thicker so that I can have a better chance to actually see them are those colours. However, the arrows of the “Rebuild surface UV” command are so thin that sometimes I see the red and green ones like red, green, grey, brown, orange, grey etc. It’s not easy to rely only on those coloured markings in my situation due to the colour blindness. But even if my vision was perfect, I would still make that proposition to ask for adding U and V markings, because this is what will make Rhino even better and more user-friendly.
You could do this already by mapping the TAB key to ‘T’ in Keyboard Options. But, you would have to surrender the ability to use tab for SubDDisplayToggle.
The hack here, is if you then change ‘T’ to SubDDisplayToggle, and TAB will continue to work as the SubDDisplayToggle. It would lose whatever you ‘want’ as T though. For instance, this means I would lose T for TOP which I usually like.
Hi Pascal. Another one (probably on the pile already somewhere) related to directional display is ExtendCrvOnSrf. It just baffles me to not have the direction shown in the command - basically left to guess and get it wrong, or always do both and always split it back. It just adds up to time after a few goes.
In this case you see I guessed right - I think that’s because it’s sticky from when I got it wrong and then made it right before giffing it. Just needs the curve dir arrow you’d get as if you were to run dupedge and run dir.
When using the “Rebuild surface UV” command, the “T” key changes the type (normal, loose, tight etc). However, the “D” key is used in that command to change the direction. Also, both of them require to press the “Enter” key subsequently, which is a bit slow for users who work with a 3d mouse with the left hand. Also, as you mentioned, assigning any letter to the “Tab” key makes the quick access to all commands starting with the same letter impossible.
Having the “Tab” key acting as “swap direction” or “lock direction” is a much better use of this key, because it’s universal for some commands already and just need to be expanded to some other commands that still are not using it. Also, the “Tab” key is easy to reach when using a 3d mouse, because the latter is positioned next to the left end of the keyboard.
Ah, that’s annoying. I remember seeing a thread where the hotkey for some tools was different between commands, when the option name is the same. Although, in it’s defence, RebuildUV doesn’t do a toggle, but rather direction only. That seems like it would be a reasonable enough option to add maybe - Toggle would have to go in front of Type. And I suppose that would mess a lot of peoples macros (if using T rather than Type). Maybe that is why there could be some aversion to adding lots of new cmd line options, which is understandable.
It’s almost as though you’d like, if you pressed the TAB key, to run a script which looks to see if there is anything like ‘Direction’ or ‘Toggle’ currently in the command line. If so, send a toggle to the command line. If not ‘do something else’, such as SubDDisplayToggle, for me personally (just because I’m used to it now). However, I feel like this might not be possible, as the script would probably have to interrupt whatever is going on in the command line. Might be a non-starter and pure fantasy.
Yeah, this is why programming the “Tab” key as an universal toggle or swap or lock key would be the best way to both make Rhino more usable and keep existing macros working as expected.
you can modify your isocurve-Display settings.
if you need you can duplicate a Display mode and name it ShadedUV… or something similar…(same for Wireframe) - hope that helps - kind regards -tom
I’m one of those rare Rhino users who turned off the surface isocurve visibility. Having to switch to a specific display mode upon activating a command that uses UV directions just to see the different colours is a bit of a hassle for me. Basically nothing can beat the convenience of seeing proper U and V markings at the end of the edited surface(s) that we will hopefully see in some of the upcoming service releases of Rhino 7.
The problem is that remembering which colour and thickness is U and which colour and thickness is V could be confusing, because the pop-up window of several tools (as well as the words in the command prompt) mention specifically “U” and “V” instead of “that 3-pixel wide green line”.
This is where simple black U and V small letters next to the surface edge (or next to the last of the arrows) would help immensely.
Having to switch to a specific display mode upon activating a command that uses UV directions just to see the different colours is a bit of a hassle for me. Basically nothing can beat the convenience of seeing proper U and V markings at the end of the edited surface(s) that we will hopefully see in some of the upcoming service releases of Rhino 7. 
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