idea #299: Translate 3D Cursor (with snapping support)

Description
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Written by hoehrer the 20 Nov 08 at 13:16. Category: Tools. Status: New

Description

I propose a quick way to (exactly) translate the 3D Cursor.
There are several ideas that could be done here, so I'll just list them all for now:

* Add support for "translate manipulator mode" (aka "move handles") to the 3D cursor. i.e. The move-arrows as they are used for ordinary objects right now. Grabbing the cursor by pressing [g] would also work in this 'mode' - it's still faster to just press LMB of course, but not as precise - see the next two points for details.

* Precise Move - Moving the cursor around should be possible by e.g. entering blender-units - Again this is exactly as for ordinary objects.

* Snapping - Add support to let the 3D-Cursor Snap to vertices/face-centers/object-centers/grid. Just think about the snapping in EditMode and the UV-Image window to get the idea.

Optional:

* Rotation info - Add support for a normalized vector of 3D cursor (only show if the user needs it) - This way one could use the 3D-cursor as an axis for quite a lot of tasks without aligning the view to it. Examples would be the "Spin" tool(s), any rotation, scaling/moving along that axis etc... all without extra objects, aligning the view or other helpers.

* Additional this would require support for rotating of the cursor-vector. See "manipulator mode" idea above.

Related ideas:
idea #166: Be able to treat the orgin of an object as an "object".
http://www.blenderstorm.org/qapoll/ideas/idea/166/

Werner

EDIT: Spelling & Some more detailed descriptions

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Comments

RayBlender wrote on the 23 Apr 08 at 21:22

I think this feature is also related to idea 288.

Note that this functionality can be achieved partly today by using an empty as a kind of 'modelling cursor'.

vilda (Blenderstorm admin) wrote on the 24 Apr 08 at 12:48

I think it would be great if snapping of cursor would be so quick as e.g. ctrl+click, as addition of current click to place cursor. It would/could boost any type of workflow. Maybe the cursor could have axes too, automatically aligning to the features snapped to, if transform space is set to normal.

hoehrer wrote on the 24 Apr 08 at 12:59

@vilda:

I think that a simple "click" command would not work very good (no dynamic user-feedback _where_ the snapping occurs)
If you use the snapping feature in edit mode a lot you'll come to the same conclusion - it's a good feature and it has been proven to work very efficiently :)

It _could_ be done, but without seeing this in action to compare I doubt it'll be as efficient.

On a different note:

I also mentioned a new "mode" in my idea, but it could just as well be a new shortcut like
[Ctrl][Shift][Alt][NumLock][Esc]+[G] (*)
to directly translate the cursor with snapping/exact values without switching to yet another mode.

No matter how the access to this translating command is implemented the functionality behind it is what is important.

Werner

(*) Well, I sure will not define that combination _here_ - I don't even know all of already the existing combinations ;)

hoehrer wrote on the 28 Apr 08 at 23:57

Oh, the translation/rotation of the stored custom transform alignments would also be very similar to this.
Dunno if it would be better as a new idea.

Werner

emu wrote on the 18 May 08 at 19:30

Another feature I'm missing is 'Retopo 3D cursor' or something likely. It's pretty hard to move the cursor the cursor to a location in the space and this could help.

Maybe even better would be kind-of a half-way retopo (like halfway shadow buffer) - place the cursor in between of the first and second face in view. This would move the cursor in the volume of most common objects.