1.) Latest update adds a scale icon near the gumball. Please can there be an option to remove this as it’s prone to being accidentally clicked and I now need to manually check the scale box each time to make sure I haven’t accidentally scaled the object using the gumball.
2.) Incremental rotate to the gumball. Every single design app allows to rotate by fixed degree increments (or by using a modifier key like SHIFT etc.). Right now it’s a pain to rotate by say, 45 degrees because there’s no coordinate legend that allows me to see which axis to rotate 45 degree in the manual input box. Life would be much easier with a coordinate legend + degree increments on the gumball rotate.
3.) Please consider smooth dragging on the gumball rotate? As it is now the gumball doesn’t rotate the object smoothly from it’s current position, it kind of snaps forward a few degrees.
4.) Maybe color the gumball rotate to match the previously suggested XYZ coordinate legend.
I could swear that scale icon has always been there (well, at least as long as I’ve been using Preform - almost 4 years). I also don’t experience the same non-smooth rotation you mention so perhaps it’s some part of your system that’s causing that.
It has always been there, yes.
I also experience the drag rotation. I click then when rotating it doesn’t rotate in the first pixels and then jumps to where it should have gone. Irritating at best. Using a Mac if that helps.
Jumpy motion on rotating and dragging is exposing a limitation of the PC I think, not the software. I don’t have any of those effects on my i9-9900K workstation and NVidia GTX2080 GPU.
Not always the case, Randy.
I use Preform on a 16 core MacPro with 384gb of RAM and a Vega II Duo for graphics which is all more than enough, actually overkill for that kind of software. Same thing happens on a Mac with an M1 chip.
That initial stutter on rotation has always happened and it’s simply some sort of bug. Imagine o want to rotate 1 degree to the right: in this case I would have to rotate the part a bit to the left (which would do nothing) and then to the right so that when I move past the initial point it starts rotating. I guess I got so used to that I do it instinctively most of the times.
The “jumpy” rotation from the gumball has always (well, since early 2016) been there. I’m using a workstation with an i9-9900k and an RTX 3090.
The amount of “jump” in each movement is actually relative to the distance your mouse pointer is from the center of the gumball. If you need very fine adjustments from the gumball, move the PreForm window to one side of the screen, click on the gumball axis you want to change, then move the mouse pointer to the far other side, and then adjust. That provides very fine control over movement.
Anyway, since I normally need repeatable alignment across versions/variants of a model, I almost always use the numerical rotation input fields. Since there’s still no way to find the net rotation of a model x/y/z you have to write that down somewhere else if you want it to be repeatable.
(Yes, I’m aware that PreForm has a “Replace” function that in theory allows you to put a new version of a model at the same orientation as the existing one. In practice, though, if the replacement model would be out-of-bounds at that orientation, it simply returns an error and fails the import – instead of, say, just importing it out-of-bounds and letting you make a slight adjustment. As a result, Replace is not worth the trouble since it fails as often as it works, and you still have to write down the net rotation just in case.)
