How do you feel about the 3D cursor? Should it's future blossom, mutate, or decay?

the thread about the Active Face seems to keep veering off into 3D cursor territory.

How do you feel about the 3D cursor and how should it’s future blossom, mutate, or decay?

(i don’t think i can update the poll, so people with other fun ideas will have to just post below for Other)

(MY OPINION, just pretend it’s post number 2: i personally would like the idea of definitely moving it from the main left mouse button, and replacing with a hotkey or main hover-menu item[although only really useful if using the context sensitive menu addon). I’d like to see it exists though and also have the ability to move with the widgets.

major boner if this were to happen as well: I’d like the see the freed left mouse button used for better control of selection. I’d like the left mouse button to do paint select, which is like circle select but instead of going into a different weird mode, it paint selects on click and stops on release. This selection would be equally useful for selecting single verticles/faces/edges (by clicking on them). The right mouse button can do box or lasso select, i don’t care. Shift+both mouse buttons would invert selected, Ctrl+either mouse button would shrink selection. Shift+Ctrl+Mouse button would grow selection. I’d be happy if this was slightly different as well. like if the mouse buttons switched funciton, or if Shift+mouse button switched functionality with Shift+Ctrl+Mouse button for either grow/invert selection. i just think this setup makes more use out of the mouse.)

new thread? 'll repost here then.

All your control; fantasies are a simple custom keymap away…

I think there’s more important stuff than another of these trivial polls… so cya!

On the poll i screwed up Michael W made a comment … Michael, if you see this, could you post that up again, sorry

Edit: you beat me to it

but to reply and not waste this post too…

i disagree just because some people’s ideas are way beyond that. (like adding widget controls to the manipulator)

also, as far as defaults… some of the major default like the mouse button defaults heavily affect how future tools are placed and implemented in the program. Things are made often to the tune of the defaults, which separately may not be a good thing.

for instance, if box or circle select was considered for a possible mouse configuration, it wouldn’t have been made to go into a different mode that makes setting up a keymap really hard unless you are a master. (i assume you are though, so i wouldn’t doubt you could do it)

its really just for fun anyways. i would have put it in off-topic chat… if it were off-topic. i’d like to see what people come up with. Forums are meant for stuff like this.

Also this discussion is happening anyways in the wrong place, i think might help move that discussion back on track.

Personally I love the 3d cursor, I normally use it for navigating the viewport and it seems very natural to me now. What exactly do people dislike about the 3d cursor. I have little experience of other 3d applications so I don’t know whether things are done better in them.

fwiw i have box select on lmb drag, deselect on clicking empty space in the view, placing the cursor on ctrl shift lmb… the rest is pretty much the default (right mouse select) though I do change a couple of newer shortcuts back to 2.49 versions… also I use “emulate 3 button mouse” which makes navigation nice…

this way it’s a a bit “maya” but still definitely blender…

here’s the keymap:

http://www.cowtoolsmedia.co.uk/scripts/mikes-nav.zip

place it in scripts/presets/keyconfig and you should be able to get it from the splash…

3D cursor IS Blender !

I personally think having an option, in the spin tool for example to either use the 3D cursor, an object, or an empty to be the origin point would be a much better thing to add.

That way people can make up their own work flow, if you like the 3D cursor then keep using it, it could be selected as default in the tools that make use of it, however if you want to make use of empties as multiple origin points then you can use them and there could be a drop down list with the available empties, and/ or objects listed.

seems like people are voting a bit for mixing 3d cursor with the manipulator.

personally, i don’t understand how that could work at all. could one of the poepl who voted for that explain a little better.

@delic - well most people who are weird about it still like the 3D cursor, but they don’t think most people use it as much as selecting a group of components. also adding widget moveability to the 3d cursor is more of an addon.

In 3ds max only recently (2008?) they indtroduced the cursor to be able to indicate a center for rotation of certain things that were impossible to do without the cursor. I don’t remember just now the name it was called and that is fine because I am trying to forget all I learned about max.

it’s called ‘working pivot’

The 3d cursor in Blender is awesome. He’s our friend. Our pal. Our buddy. Our savior.

In moments of despair we can always rely on… the 3d cursor.

And it’s great that even lately it has been given more functions and possibilities (Lock to Cursor & the add-on Cursor Control).

+1 to what Sago said.

Ive been using it more and more these days, especially with the Shift+S functions, use them constantly, especially when modeling, rotating things, scaling things etc etc, and for resetting the view every time I move onto work on something else in the scene.

You dont really understand how much use it has till you think about it I guess.

I also like the 3d-cursor, but never place it by clicking directly, I always/only use shift+s.

if you merge the 3d manipulator with the 3d cursor, you dont have to do stuf like rotate around 3d cursor etc,

I don’t understand that. The manipulator is different to the cursor. You select an object and you have the manipulator on the origin of the object. Then if I want rotate the object around a point in space where I place the cursor you would need to substitute it with an empty or other object to be able to do such a rotation. That was what happened in max, we were rotating around objects or a dummy (empty) because lack of a 3D cursor. But even the way they created the 3dcursor was a shit because instead of just click on screen like in blender there you have to enter a special mode do your thing and then exit that special mode (yes it was working pivot as said above, I didn’t remember the name).

But I can agree with op. All that the manipulator does can be substituted with an empty for example. Selected to empty. Empty to selected. Rotate around empty…

@bao2

yeah but if they merged as I stated, 3dmanipulator-cursor could be by default at selected mesh origin, but left clicking it in 3d space would offset origin and 3dmanipulatorcursor for rotation / scaling from a diffrent position. and skipping step such as setting scale/rotation to 3d cursor then back to mesh intersection / origin.

for me 3d cursor is 99% of the time something I misplace and keep hitting shift+C to make it go back to center … it’s extremly easy to misplace with wacom pen.

Except to prevent visual annoying, I don’t see any interest of scaling or rotating 3DCursor. It is just a cursor.
Trying to superimposed its lines to an edge is not precise like a snap or using its coordinates in View Properties.

But I think that a widget to translate cursor along a custom transform orientation can help for transform operators using 3DCursor as a pivot point.
The center of rotation could be set at a certain distance of a selected object according to object local axis.

But this interest is just limited to not have to create an empty as pivot point in particular case.

Fire -> wheel -> 3D cursor…

I would add a “work-plane” attached to the cursor, and handle the cursor position and the work-plane orientation using own widgets.

With a work-plane we could set a plane to control for instance where the grease pencil strokes would be drawn in space, or snap vertices to that plane, or constraining de position of new extruded verts to that plane, etc.

+1 to this. Really.