sascha
Better than nothing but I have to say it's still disappointing. In Peak mode I have only one translation direction, the direction of the normal. But where are the other axes? And why can I not rotate the component in normal space? And by the way, where is the object space? I wish Side Effects would integrate these basic standard functions into Houdini.

I partially agree with you. Peak mode is peak mode it moves the points/poly along it's normal that's all it does, so there are no other axis, I don't think that should change. But in transform edit mode I think it should default to orienting to the local normal so that the other axis are available and then there should be a toggle to change to object space, and another one to change to world space.
But for starters it would be nice if there was a quick way to align the handle to normals and not have to use orient picking all the time which is way too slow to be much use.
Orient picking should be reserved for when there is no obvious other easily accessible orientation to use. Normals are normally the most useful and it should be much quicker to align to them. Like I say I would have them as default for edit ops.

Simon
Peak mode is peak mode it moves the points/poly along it's normal that's all it does, so there are no other axis, I don't think that should change.

However, I see no use for a peak mode if I could change the space for the transform handle itself. And the other two axes wouldn't be in the way if you don't need them.

Grab a load of points and you can drag them all up along their normals,
how could you move them all with a transform handle?

Simon
Grab a load of points and you can drag them all up along their normals,
how could you move them all with a transform handle?

Ok Simon, you got a point there. :wink:

But nevertheless, I need all three coordinate system modes for the manipulator handles.

Simon
Grab a load of points and you can drag them all up along their normals,
how could you move them all with a transform handle?

in addition to a coord-space
changing option you would have a
selection transform handle option:

grouped about selection center
(places one transform handle in an
averaged alignment to the selection).

grouped selection about object pivot
(just uses one object aligned handle,
or in houdini's case a world aligned
handle).

un-grouped selection
(places aligned handles on each
selected item, transform one and the others
transform about their corresponding axis).

some handle options may have to be disabled
for the last one though…

refer to 3dsmax (any version, I think) for
a working example.

-cpb

Exactly what Simon and cpb said. Orientation picking is tedious and time consuming, and world coord scaling is no good. But you know what, the poly tools are constantly improoving, look at PolyBevel in 6 and then in 7, it's vastly better now. So I have faith that these issues will be adressed…..with enough nagging of course.