Move tool woes

[Haamu]

One of the biggest reasons I still prefer to use zBrush over 3dc is the move tool. The way it currently works in 3dc is sluggish and inaccurate. I may be in the minority in wanting this improved quickly, though. I have fairly peculiar way to create broad (sometimes even smaller) shapes on a model, as I tend to give small nudges to the surface in rapid succession. That is very efficient in ZB (if you ignore the mesh crumbling), but quite unusable in 3dc at the moment.

interestingly, they changed the way move works in zb3.5 with their "click, then hold shift/alt" method for alternate operation, which requires some impressive finger acrobatics to do quickly.

All of the following applies to the surface mode variant. I'm not expecting voxel version to work similarly.

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First thing is the snapping, which I find quite strange. First I thought it has to with snapping to voxel grid, but it also happens in surface mode and seems to work in screen space (you can zoom in to make it work more precisely). Spacing can be used but that takes a lot of processing power and starts to lag behind the cursor.

Second thing is accidental viewport orbiting, which affects all tools of course, but it's specially damaging to move as strokes more often start near the edges. I don't think the free space orbiting is particularly useful anyway since there is always alt+drag orbit, so maybe there should be option to disable it. Additionally, I think it would be beneficial to have small area (in empty space) around the model where you could still pull on the closest surface without cursor going inactive.

Third thing, though this is mainly uneducated guesswork, there seems to be quite a lot of hard drive activity when applying rapid pen strokes with move tool (and to much lesser extent with other tools as well), which I would guess, is related to undo. It can also cause a small lag spike after each stroke, which I find even more damaging than the snapping. If that is correct, I could happily live without any undo at all, or have 1 or 2 stages and store them in memory instead of disk. Of course that should be an option and not default behavior.

[side note]There's another possibly related issue, where brushes slowly become very sluggish and laggy over time, and I have to reload the scene periodically. That's in 32bit non-cuda version, winxp32.

On less important final note, moving could use a strength modifier as well. It might not seem important, but it adds some comfort for making more subtle changes.

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[philnolan3d]

One of the biggest reasons I still prefer to use zBrush over 3dc is the move tool. The way it currently works in 3dc is sluggish and inaccurate. I may be in the minority in wanting this improved quickly, though. I have fairly peculiar way to create broad (sometimes even smaller) shapes on a model, as I tend to give small nudges to the surface in rapid succession. That is very efficient in ZB (if you ignore the mesh crumbling), but quite unusable in 3dc at the moment.

I don't see this, are you using it on a really dense mesh or something?

Second thing is accidental viewport orbiting, which affects all tools of course, but it's specially damaging to move as strokes more often start near the edges. I don't think the free space orbiting is particularly useful anyway since there is always alt+drag orbit, so maybe there should be option to disable it. Additionally, I think it would be beneficial to have small area (in empty space) around the model where you could still pull on the closest surface without cursor going inactive.

This can be turned off by going to Camera > Custom Navigation (1st item) > Maya. Personally alternate between the Alt button and no Alt button, especially when I'm feeling lazy. You can also change that and just about everything else related in the Camera > Customize Navigation panel.

[Haamu]

This can be turned off by going to Camera > Custom Navigation (1st item) > Maya. Personally alternate between the Alt button and no Alt button, especially when I'm feeling lazy. You can also change that and just about everything else related in the Camera > Customize Navigation panel.

uh oh, can't believe I didn't notice that, considering I place refs through camera menu all the time. I was searching at the wrong places. This sure simplifies things, thanks for mentioning that. As it turns out, with orbiting disabled you CAN actually pull surface in the empty space, so that makes my point quite moot.

I don't see this, are you using it on a really dense mesh or something?

Well, saying it's unusable isn't entirely fair, its quite pleasantly fast for the most part. It's mainly the snapping that is driving me nuts. My third point about lagging becomes more apparent at higher densities and I guess it's understandable if it can't be helped, but in that case ZB still has the clear advantage as moving never becomes an inconvenience.