movePointOnBG (LW 7.5, PC)

movePointOnBG

This plugin lets you move points around like the LW builtin 't' except the points stay on the surface of the polygons you have in your BG layers. Again, you can move them in any viewport, and they will roughly follow your mouse pointer around, but snapped to the surfaces you have in your BG layer. The points drift a little in perspective mode, but not enough to affect performance, in my opinion. Obviously dragging points on and off of surfaces very oblique to your view angle can move them closer to or further from each other in world space, even though they may look the same in screen space. Like addPointOnBG, it works best if the BG layer contains planar polys (so to be safe, triangulate everything first). If you have problems or suggestions, contact me at plugins@ribsngibs.com. Spam me and I kick your ass.

An example of how to use it:

Say you've got a polygon whose vertices lie on a background surface (the sphere), but the resolution of your polygon is way too small to represent the surface.

So you use the Knife tool to make lots more polygons, but as you can see, none of the new points and polygons lie on the surface you want.

Select all the points you want to snap to the surface and select the "movePointOnBG" tool.

And simply click once in the viewer in which you don't want the points to visibly move (i.e. click in the view to define the axis that the points will move along). Here I've clicked in the Back view, which pulls all the points along the Z axis until they lie on the sphere again.

It works in the perspective viewer, too.

You can move points around, too, not just snap them, and they remain stuck to the BG surface:

Last updated: Apr 26 2004