original source – printed emails from tS beta testing, processed with FreeOCR from http://www.paperfile.net/
Snapping & constraints
Snapping and constraints are used to allow high precision modeling. Snapping tools compute nearest position that may be useful (grid point, vertex, edge…) and constraints lock movement to specified direction(s). These tools are accessible from Player toolbar.
Tool is activated by clicking on it; additional tool properties are accessible by rclicking on the tool icon. Panels for snapping tools are located in preferences encapsulator
(/Preferences/Snapping/ and /Preferences/Snapping/Point edit snapping).
Snapping & constraints can be combined and activated together. For example you can have active grid snapping and snap to edge at once. Then when moving or drawing a polygon nearest point will be used as a snap position. This is also valid for constraints, for example when constraining movement to two non-parallel planes movement will be constrained to their intersection.
You can have as many snapping managers as you wish, movement widget tools are now extended to contain snapping group name. In this way you can add special controls to Widgets that will cause snapping to selected elements, whereas other controls can move without snapping or constraints.
Polygon draw
Polygon draw tool allows directly drawing faces or edges during point edit mode.
Activate the tool by clicking on Polydraw tool icon in Player toolbar.
When selected object is not in point edit mode tool will activate it.
You add vertices connected by edges, by clicking on the mesh faces.
To modify vertex position during polygon draw, drag existing vertex.
To add new vertex on the edge, click on it.
When hovering above edge, Polydraw tool shows high/ite of vertex that will be added.
To remove the vertex, move the vertex you want to delete to another vertex.
Tool will not allow creating invalid geometry. When trying to create bad polygon highlite will show in red.
To close the loop, click on the first vertex.
You can draw polygon across multiple faces, but edges need to pass thru edges or vertices on neighboring faces.
When you draw acceptable set of edges, Polydraw will change highlite to selection color.
When you activate other widget tool in this state, tool will finish without closing whole polygon. This behavior is intended for drawing edges or adding vertices.
Snapping and Polydraw
You can use snapping with Polydraw:
simply enable or disable snapping & constraint tools when drawing polygons.
Activate guideline by snapping current vertex to edge and press shift key. If you want to move in perpendicular direction, hold shift and ctrl.
