Canvas Mode
When drawing greasepencil objects, the default view navigation controls are a hindrance for 2D art.
For example, if you accidentally press Middle mouse button (MMB) on your stylus; you get thrown out of your camera/perspective and rotate in 3D.
We need a 'canvas mode' which changes the functionality of Middle mouse button (MMB). This should be toggled on & off with a keyboard shortcut, and a UI button (maybe next to viewport rotation gizmo).
A strong visual interface change should happen to let us know we're in this mode (change the style of viewport rotation gizmo).
Here's how I think canvas mode should work:
- MMB becomes pan view.
- Alt+MMB becomes rotate canvas.
- Ctrl+Alt+MMB becomes reset canvas rotation (or Shift+MMB).
- Ctrl+MMB should still be zoom.
The most important aspect of this is that rotating in 3D isn't possible in canvas mode.
I hope you all understand just how important it is for 2D artists to smoothly and quickly rotate the canvas while drawing. Drawing certain angles and curves without rotating the canvas is tiring, difficult and slow. Resetting the canvas rotation is extremely important and a shortcut for that should be easy to access.
10 Comments
Great, but I think it should be an option inside camera view--something like "lock camera view"--because the camera pov is ultimately the angle that you're gonna be drawing for, right?
@hyuri.pimentel: I think it'd be good outside of the camera too. I can imagine times where I would quickly want it in texture painting.
@ajay.dixon: I see.
Let´s extend those thoughts to a wacom pen artist. The gizmo should work with wacoms.
This would be a great enhancement. In 2.79 this was easy to do. You could alt+NUMPAD 7 to align to a face, and then CTRL+SHIFT+Scroll to roll the view without orbiting. Unfortunately the CTRL+SHIFT+Scroll shortcut doesn't work any more. Your solution is definitely more elegant and user friendly than the old shortcut.
@dpdpforlife: The problem with the CTRL+SHIFT+scroll is something I've never known about, thanks! It makes so much more sense to adjust the rotation with mouse motion than scrollwheel. Especially for tablet users.
Also, I forgot to mention that to complete the rotation, I'd prefer it to be left mouse button. It's so much more accurate with a tablet than MMB.
Now that the beta is out, I'd like to draw some more attention to this potent idea :D
I'm currently working mostly with Greasepencil, and orbiting on middle-mouse was becoming so annoying that I had to change the shortcut itself to pan for all 3D views (with shift+mmb for orbit).
While this works while I'm in GP, as soon as I switch to layout mode I trip over myself. So I think a per-viewport 2D–3D toggle would make a lot of sense!
This is something this newer thread talks about as well: Viewport current view plane lock (orbit/view rotation lock toggle)
My only concern is... how do you align the camera and rotate the canvas per camera? Not everyone will want to draw into world planes.
@ondraise15: Maybe the view aligns with the currently selected grease pencil primitive when you go into canvas mode?
@dpdpforlife: I'd want this feature to use the current viewport position. Having a greasepencil object accidentally selected will lose that position. Aligning view/camera to greasepencil object should be a separate feature.