Moving selections along the plane perpendicular to a polygon normal?!

[lardbros]

Hi everyone.

I've asked this before, and never got a decent response, or a method that worked, so i am calling all you pro mechanical modellers out there to let me know exactly how you manage!

Basically, i'm doing alot of solids (as opposed to organic) modelling, using 3dStudio MAX and can easily adjust the position/scale/rotation of a selection by just using the gizmo thing.

I've been using Lightwave for years, but tend to just do organic stuff, but am now wondering how on earth Lightwave users have coped without the need for moving along the axis of the normal.

I don't mean moving the polygon along the axis of the normal, but moving it or scaling it and keeping the polygon's normal on the same plane.

How is this done with standard LW, and not using the C-plane plugin?

I have attached an illustration of what i mean.

[colkai]

Sp_Move would be my guess.
Or translate plus if you don't want 3rd party, there are a myriad of ways to move within that.

EDIT:
Just tried it in Translate Plus, select your 4 front polys, activate TranslatePlus (Modify->Translate->Move->TranslatePlus with studio layout in Modeller).
'n' for numeric, choose 'segment' for axis, then when the little markers pop up, select two points either let/right or top/bottom on the edge of the selection to control how the selectino moves.

Would be very nice to have some sort of presets for this as at the moment, it's a lot of mouse clicks to do this.

I've not mastered SpMove yet so I'll need to play about to give you more advice for that, sorry.

[mkiii]

Coincidentally, I've just been trying to get TranslatePlus to move a face along the face normal, and it just refuses to do it properly.

Even a face that is flat on a major axis moves the face well off perpendicular as you can see when you use the tool with normal display turned on.

Modeler still needs some serious polishing on these tools. I had hoped they would be OK in v9.0. But...

[colkai]

Agreed, BTW, there were some old tools, no longer up alas, called Normal-Move and Normal Rotate. Along with 'stretch-point' these are in my list of absolute essentials.

[lardbros]

Yeah, i've tried translate plus... just seems a longwinded way of doing things when some XYZ handles aligned to the world or local co-ordinates would be SO much nicer!

This, in my opinion is a biggy, never mind. Just a shame that there isn't a decent option in LW out of the box!

[colkai]

I agree, I'm sure SP_Move would do it quite easily, but it isn't easy to wrap my head around the myriad of functions in it, though you can save presets, so once set up, it sould be easy to use repeatedly.

[munky]

Hello there,

Have a look at SP_Move3 chaps,

http://www.pictrix.jp/lw/Sp_Move3/rollscale.html

regards

paul

[lardbros]

Yeah, i've seen that and it looks ace. But it's a pay for plugin isn't it?

I was curious as to how people have coped without this function. I guess C-plane was the way i used to, but it was flaky with large models! Ah well, maybe Newtek will invent some super gizmo that will do everything?!

Maybe when our modelling tools are opened fully into layout we will be able to use the local/world axis on individual selections?