Forum

Apologies for the terrible formatting above,

it's fitting that the forum had bugs and missing features when writing about such things inside this software..
I was able to recover what I wrote, but it was littered with HTML markup, and I can't see a way to edit or delete my own post/thread to fix it...

I've used a number of 3d programs in my time, but one of the fundamentally useful tools that I feel is missing in capture, is the "Gizmo" or "transform tool"It's something very useful in programs such as Sketchup, Unreal engine, Blender, MA3D and many many more

I've attached a few above but I'm sure you're all familiar with it. It can allow you to intuitively manipulate an object in 3d space without needing to jump between so many views like you do in capture. Typically translating, rotating and often resizing objects, either by choosing where you click or by holding various combinations of modifier keys.

In many designs I work on, it can be hard to pick apart the exact object you intend to, and to see exactly what you're doing, while in the orthogonal views, many things end up stacked on top of each other. I know you can build filters, but that's a whole set of extra steps when you just need to move an object from A to B or adjust something.

In Capture, I need to pilot a 3d camera to where I can see what I'm doing, select the object there, switch to the other views to move it orthogonally to get it about where I need it... it's ok, but it feels a bit outdated and slow sometimes. Many programs have more powerful and intutive object manipulation in a single viewscreen than Capture does in 3... We'd love to have some of this experience in Capture, it would really speed things up.

----

The other (but related) omission that we find cumbersom is the lack of choice between local object/group axis and the world axis. This is particularly noticeable when rotating objects or dealing with angled (or circular) trusses or non rectangular stage designs.

Try work on a tilted circular truss and you'll soon see what I mean... often better to build it flat, and then tilt the whole thing... but that makes prototyping and refining ideas, quite slow. Especially if it's not just tilted on a single axis... 

eg. it would be great to rotate a fixture around it's own axis or a group of objects. Currently it takes a lot of eyeballing, view switching and approximations or it takes doing a bunch of math (or using another program) or it takes building it as orthogonally as you can before doing all these transformations to it again... 

This is something that MA3d and Sketchup also allow and they're relatively simple programs.

damn, it's a shame it doesn't store these images inside the forum?

it just links to wherever they are copied from...
This means any threads with images will be broken in a couple years...?

Making it not particularly useful as an information repository?

Is this possible to change? or if this forum not really a priority for you guys?

Plus one for this, being able to rotate fixtures or object through an axis orientation widget in a 3D view, I think this would be very beneficial and more usable than with the single handle in each 2D view. Being able to switch that between global and object values as well.

+1 

I'm very new to Capture and while I'm pleasantly surprised that watching an hour of videos brought me up to speed,  not being able to resize an object directly really irks me. 

All the objects you can insert into a model in capture, you can also manipulate. It's just that you have to do that by typing in exact measurements. 

Freely shaping an abject does not add value in an otherwise scaled environment (in my opinion). If you need to do cad-drawing, I suggest using a tool that is made for this (like Blender, Sketchup, Rhino) instead of wanting these features from the lighting-oriented tool that Capture is. I'd rather see Capture spend its development time improving or adding lighting-related tools than modeling-related ones.