Arbitrary centre for vertex/edge/poly selections?

[MJV]

Originally posted by astrofish
In the daily tips Kaiskai explained how we can make a multiselection of objects and then translate/scale/rotate them around the origin of any of the objects. By using a null object, we can effectively place the origin anywhere we like. This is excellent, and handy.

My question, is there any equivalent for vertex/edge/poly selections, as opposed to object selections?

This is something that Blender had(has) which I found very useful.

The way it worked was that there was a '3D Cursor' which could be manually dragged around, or snapped to a selection (object(s), vertices or faces).

When you made a selection (again, object, vertices or faces) you could choose the origin to be used for the transformations. The choices were average of selection (which is basically what C4D does at the moment), global origin, object origin, or 3D cursor.

This meant that you could, for example:-
1. Select a vertex of an object.
2. Move 3D cursor to selection.
3. Select a bunch of faces of a different object.
4. Transform these faces relative to the 3D cursor.

The fact that it's a two step process (3D cursor is centred on an arbitrary selection, then you apply transformations to a totally different arbitrary selection, using the 3D cursor as origin) made it very flexible whilst still being easy to control.

It seems that C4D now has this capability (though still in a limited way) for transforming object selections, but not for vertex/edge/face selections.

Any comments?

Right on all counts. This has become a sore point for many users, there's been alot of talk about it on the Postforum. Currently there is no way to do this with poly/point selections. It's a standard feature many years now with lesser apps than Cinema, and it's the modeling feature that I and many others would most like to see implemented in Cinema without further delay.

[AdamT]

And this is where I pipe in and say, "yeah, what he said!!"

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