Scaled by cage.
There could be a fast scaling system, common in most editors, that would allow you to scale selections from one corner by nailing the opposite. In the 3D view the operation would be similar to a Lattice of 2 * 2 * 2 but directly accessing the cube faces when the cursor overlaps the face. Meshes, UVs, Keys, Clips, Curves, Nodes ... could benefit from this scaling system. I do not know if it would be convenient to add to the cage functions of movement, rotation, free transformation, alignment and distribution.
5 Comments
Cage Widgets would be very useful. Scaling from one point to another without using the 3D Cursor and having the ability to move objects in that particular axis would be great. TrueSpace, Softimage and others have a box widget for scale, transform and rotation. They are extremely user friendly and hotkey free.
First a Lattice is a deformer and what i suggest is a transformer of scale. It is more like scaling the object using the 3DCusor than a Lattice. In 3D view it could use the global/locals/view coordinates, or an the vertex/edge/face coordinate as the rest of transformations, and snaps.
Although have now come out some addons that speed ups work with Lattices, their interaction not as fast as I suggest, nor transportable to all editors. When placing the mouse cursor over a face of the box, it should be automatically selected, and clicking and moving the mouse would start the rescaling.
Does nothing that can not be done with the 3D Cursor and scaling, and in certain circumstances resembles a Lattice, it simply hagilizes simple tasks. I think even that could be combined with the rest of transformers, as a complement.
Exactly what advantage would this have over actually just using a Lattice modifier?
OK... so this is much more like using Proportional editing with a linear fall-off. Somewhat more convenient to access (how would it be enabled?), but less powerful.
I'd have to try it out, but at first blush I'm personally not a fan of this at all. For just as many clicks I can scale with the 3D Cursor and proportional editing, plus keep the fast scaling features that we already have.
Bear in mind, I do all of my modeling completely without using the 3D manipulator at all. If the cage were the default when pressing S, that would completely change my workflow and adds an interface element that, IMHO, gets in the way of me seeing my model.