Using an Edit SOP, I would like to translate a face relative to its normal, or a group of faces relative to their averaged normals.

Under Handle Parameters, handle alignment can only be set to World, Object and View space. Is it possible to align a handle to e.g. the normal of a face so that the handle's Y axis corresponds with the face normal?

If not, how can the equivalent effect be achieved in Houdini?

A search yielded a work around for aligning a handle to a single poly here:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=10223&highlight=orientation+picking [sidefx.com]
but when I try to translate the poly, it flips arbitrarily. And I would still like the ability to perform local translations on groups of polys.

It seems that, surprisingly, this cannot be done in Houdini.

Is the Peak sop not what you are looking for? It is meant to translate along normals.

Thanks for the reply.

The Peak SOP and the Edit SOP's Peak function do not scale or rotate to the local coordinates of a poly selection. Also, moving multiple polys scales them unwantedly with distance, so even this function is of limited value to me.

As mentioned, for single polys I would like to be able to align the handle's Y axis to the poly normal. For multiple selections normals would be averaged.

The ability to select polys on the fly with the translation tool axis automatically oriented to normals is standard in other 3D apps and is essential to my workflow.

Hopefully as SESI broadens its market beyond the high-end FX niche, it will add functionality to certain areas of its modelling toolset to match the competition.

Right click the handle and toggle the peak handle

No hotkey currently exists for it, but you could easily set it up to be something like shift t

go to Edit->Hotkeys
search for Peak
they type a capital T in your hot key assigner, and press accept.

Thanks for the suggestion but unfortunately this just re-activates the Transform tab in the Edit SOP. Handle alignment is then set according to the Handle Parameters (Object, World or View).