Improved Edge/Vertex slide and Smooth Tool.

Right now in blender the modal tools in 2.8 are basically just toggles for hotkeys in blender. A lot of new people to blender are telling me that the tools are no good because they are slow to use. My response is usually that they should use the hotkeys.

However, since the new polybuild tool was added, I've noticed it has a nice flow and selection highlight that made me think of how other tools should probably be brought up to this standard.

Here is a video of a the tweak tool in Soft Image, that I have been told is fast and easy to use.

youtube.com/watch

It can:

• highlight faces verts or edges before they are selected
• activate on the selected face/edges/verts with one click that is then held to slide as desired
• confirms on release automatically

Along with this I think that the smooth tool could have some intelligence to it as well. It currently requires you to select the verts and then smooth them, which is fine in some cases. However, it is not really a tool, it's just a toggle for pressing "Smooth Vertices".

I think it could be made to work more intelligently, such as the polybuild tool or the Soft Image tweak tool that allow for selection and activation to be combined in a more fluent and intelligent way. One example might be for it to work like the relax brush in the reopoflow addon, which has options to influence all verts or only selected verts and to ignore mesh boundary.

Thanks I look forward to the discussion and to help bring a more fun experience to blender.