Make better use of the Status bar

Make better use of the Status bar

I've hardly noticed it doing anything. One thing I'd love to see is tooltips replaced with the text appearing in the status bar (very useful when trying to remember what the keyframe toggles do).

Many 3D programs tell you how to use the current tool in the status bar -- love that. (It had me up and running in Form*Z -- a ridiculously powerful and not terribly intuitive program -- in less than an hour.)

It would be great if status gave you numerical feedback on operations. E.g. when you rotate or translate an object, exactly what you're doing is in the status bar.

Finally, it would be even better if you could use the "tab" key (or whatever) to convert a mouse operation into a numerical operation, entering parameters into the status bar (like Form*Z and Max, if I recall correctly). So you rotate an object about 310 degrees, but not exactly, and then hit tab and type 310, enter and bang, you're done.

I'll second that.

Me too.........

and me!x.....

Although I'm not a designer this makes sense to me.

Almost entered a wish list item of my own before I noticed this. Being able to tab into a status bar and adjust transformations manually would be excellent.

Me too!

You could also show the current grid's scale.

Sorry to gravedig a bit here. I did not want to start a new thread about this topic. I've been exploring the Status bar role and uses, and it could be a great thing if we got more uses out of it. I think it would boost up Cheetah3D's precision modeling capabilities. Is there any chance that we might get something like this on 5.0?

I support this idea too. I'm a SketchUp user & a precision-freak. Tabbing into a number-value field would be nice.

now version five has arrived but nothing happened to the status bar which is void most of the time while still users ask how to translate faces at a certain angle and stuff.
a status bar showing polycounts of the current objects and selections as well as all transform values would be a huge enhancement.

Agreed. This would really help.

Yup I vote for my own suggestion again! It's seriously frustrating not to be able to nail a coordinate for a vertex move, etc.

I think this is a crucial area for improvement.

For a long time there was no numerical feedback or control for tools like transform, now we have the origin coordinates accessible within the tool panel, the rotation in the status bar, but for scale there is still nothing, nowhere.
I just can't scale a polygon (selection) precisely to 2.0 0r 0.5 like I can rotate it easily 90° by just watching the status bar.

So: Every parameter change should be displayed in the status bar:
- move distance (translate, extrude, bevel etc)
- rotation degrees
- scale factor


There are two levels of information, about scene and object, that can be accessed by clicking on the icon or cmd-I respectively, showing a pop-up-window disabling the scene and the workflow, you need to press "ok" to continue.
All the while the status bar remains empty.

This is at least very unfortunate.
Informations about the number of the polygons or vertices are needed frequently, especially when using the optimize or cover tool.
There are countless threads about double geometry problems or optimize not working which would be unnecessary if the geometry details were shown in the status bar continuously.

So: Do away with the object information pop-up and have the details displayed permanently in the status bar for the selected object:

- number of polygons (followed by number of selected in brackets)
- number of edges (selected in brackets)
- number of vertices (selected in brackets)

In case of the selected object in the object browser being a spline, particle system etc
path, segment or particle count would be shown.

Polygon count after modifiers would be shown when modifier is selected.


I think the status bar is broad enough to show six object values plus one tool value together:

Status: Scale=0.276; 1056 (96) Polygons, 1812 (0) Edges, 896 (896) Vertices

Click to expand...

or

Status: Scale=0.276; selected 96 of 1056 Polygons, 0 of 1812 Edges, 896 of 896 Vertices

Click to expand...

I like these ideas too. There's enough room in the status bar to fit a lot of info.

It would also be nice for that info to be persistent until the next data change overwrites it. That way you don't have to keep your eye on it and remember exactly what was displayed before releasing the mouse button.