Feature : Object relocation tools

Summary

New tool functionality to aid rapid re-location or re-orientation of scene objects. In the scope of this work, it focuses on non-adjacent operations (ie, light near an object) as opposed to layout-style alignment or distribution operations.

User Story

What

As a user, I’d like to make it easier to move lights (or anything else that is transformable) to where I’m working in a scene, even if they are not currently visible in my current view.

Why

In lighting, it’s common to need to create a light and move it near a character or other scene object as part of initial placement. When a new light is created, it defaults to the scene origin which may be out of view. It is a long-winded process to manoeuvre this into the right place using the current translate-tumble-refine mechanism.

Feature Proposal

Translate Tool Improvements (snap)

Translate the scene selection (if possible) to the clicked point in space by:

1. Hold down the v key and click in the Viewer with the Translate Tool active.

Notes

• The bounding box centre of the selection is aligned with the clicked point.
• If multiple scene locations are selected, the overall bounding box centre used, preserving the relative positions of each location.

Rotate Tool Improvements (aim)

Orient the selection such that its negative z-axis is pointing towards the clicked point in space by:

1. Hold the v key and click in the Viewer with the Rotate tool active.

Example Scenarios

Translate

1. Create a new light (assuming the viewer camera is looking elsewhere, it will be off-screen at the origin).
2. Select the new light in the Hierarchy View.
3. Turn on the Transform Tool in the viewer.
4. Hold the v key and click on the ground plane visible in the viewer, roughly where the light should be.
5. Use the normal translate handles on the light to adjust position to a suitable height.

Aim

1. Select several lights in a light rig that are intended to illuminate a character, positioned correctly, but not aimed well.
2. Hold the v key and click on the characters head. The lights will now all be pointing at the character.

Notes

• Generally scoping this work to lighting/lookdev workflows, rather than full layout workflows, but it’s worth calling out easy wins where there is overlap.

• In all v-<click> scenarios (translate, aim), if there are no objects under the clicked point, nothing happens. This is as the z-depth is ambiguous, so picking a ‘sensible’ value is tricky, and depends on scene scale, etc…

• This functionality is a ‘first step’. A proper centre-of-interest tool (along with pivot adjustment) requires some more involved changes to Gaffer itself. We hope these improvements would add value in the mean time.

[boberfly]

My 2c would be v snap, because Maya. x is fine though, but it’s grid in my head. Maya snap list

[themissingcow]

Removed the following, due to prohibitive implementation costs:

• Context menus (required splitting out a lot of logic from existing tools to shareable code)
• Drag for continual updates (required significant refactor of selection picking to ignore the affected objects to prevent self-intersection and the erroneous “coming right at you” positioning that results without that).