I’m really happy about the development of this tool.
I played around with it and it is certainly a great start and I can’t wait to see the planned features implemented, too.
Other than that:
I heavily agree with the feedback, that creating spheres feels very odd, not really intuitive & fun to use (It’s the same with cylinders and cones for me). There are two reasons:
In 99% of the cases I don’t want to spawn a squeezed cone, cylinder, or sphere - however, I have to actively prevent this with the modifier key every time. Having a fixed aspect ratio for these tools from the beginning would be great.
When thinking about spheres, we think in volume, not in cross-section. It is really hard to imagine what the result will look like when drawing the crosssection as a base plane first. So, it would be great if the sphere spawns as a whole and only it’s size changes with dragging.
I think doing it differently for only select shapes would make the tool inconsistent, however I do wish that there was a modifier key combo that would set a uniform scale for all dimensions simultaneously so instead of a 2-step process (set width/depth, then set height) it becomes a 1-step process when I want a uniform scale; modifier+click+drag, done.
I hesitated to suggest such behavior because the design seemed more or less set in stone, that objects would spawn in a 2-step process.
But, honestly, what you describe is my preference as well. It would feel more intuitive, behave consistently throughout all tools (including potential added ones later), and in many cases would be quicker, too.
Exactly.
The same thing should be done with the ALL the extrude tools. I don’t see the point of having them be separate tools. They could be modes of just one tool.
One bug / oversight I’ve noticed is that in edit mode, when auto merge vertices is enabled, snapped vertices should merge and vertices should be inserted into the edge loop they are placed upon.
I have been modeling only for 3 years, but very very rarely i would have the need to add more than one primitive at a time. Most of the time you add it then you want to edit it. So right now this tool olny increases the ammount of hotkeys one have to use to add a primitive.
It should default to the selected selection tool (box select, tweak, etc) after you created the primitive.
Agreed. I think this tool is going to make much more sense once we’re able to use it to place arbitrary objects and collection instances. For set dressing this may become nicely complementary to scatter tools, or even replace it, provided we get the option to “paint” with several objects on click+drag instead of creating just one object. Probably out of scope I know…
As long as this list can be made accessible by a hotkey - sure. Otherwise I’d find a long-click button just as tedious as a dropdown list in the toolbar. Or … just add them to the standard “Add Mesh” Menu [Shift-A] as a separate entry, if necessary.
Unrelated to this it would be really great if the tool remains in an active creation state with handles to adjust until the tool is dropped.
But yeah - I’m super happy about this tool as well.
One of the best things in blender when modeling are the ‘‘modal’’ options that make things very organic and fluid. Like controlling the ammout of segments in the bevel tool with scroll wheel.
It would be fantastic to have it on this tool, to control the amount of segments a cylinder will have for instance.
I like the Add Object tool, but the modal feels unfocused. It’d be nice if we could toggle the aspect ratio, snapping mode, pivot mode, and so on, with keys in the QWER row, freeing up the modifier keys for increment snapping and precision input. It’d also be nice to see the transform information, as well as (some form of) state signaling.
Something I’m unsure of is how canceling should be handled. Should right click cancel the entire operation, or undo the current step and only cancel the operation when you’re on the first step?
I’d like to have cube as non-uniform, because it would be mainly used as starting point in boxmodeling. The box is the most universal shape for that, and it gives you nice base for quad mesh. With click’n’drag you can easily prototype what you want. How often you need matematically perfect cube anyway?
Sphere, cylinder and cone are different case, because they are defined with circular base or crossection.
Because in vast majority of cases you don’t want to create cube, but rather box shape of arbitrary proportions. In case of cylinder or sphere though, the case where you want a squished cylinder
squished cone
or a squished sphere
is a minority.
So the logic here is extremely simple. The defaults should satisfy the most common use cases. That’s why they are called “defaults” after all. If something, by default, does not exercise the behavior majority desires, then it’s simply wrong default.
In case of Cylinder, first click-drag should define radius, and subsequent mouse button release should define height, then finally mouse click should confirm the shape creation.
Same applies to Cone.
In case of Sphere, simple click-drag should define radius, and release should confirm the shape creation.
The new Add Mesh tool introduced in 2.90 has some really poor UX choices, resulting in really poor usability compared to similar tools in other software. Namely, in the pursuit of some fallacious “consistency”, all the different shapes are created with non uniform scale, requiring press of an additional modifier key to make them uniform. This goes against general expectations of many users, where they expect certain shapes to be uniform by default, while others not.
It’s a really, really bad idea to go the consistency way here, instead of going the “what the user expects to happen” way. So what should happen:
Cube should be created non-uniformly, and require modifier key to be uniform. (Happens currently)
Cone should be created uniformly in XY axes, requiring modifier key to be non-uniform (Does not happen currently)
Cylinder should be created uniformly in XY axes, requiring modifier key to be non-uniform (Does not happen currently)
Spheres should be created uniformly in all 3 axes, requiring modifier key to be non-uniform and initiate 2 step creation process (Does not happen currently)
I can not stress how important it is to get this right, since during modeling, primitive creation is something that happens very often, so getting the UX wrong here will ruin the efficiency potential this tool could bring, if done right.
