Greetings!
Just a little bit of a poll for interest in this thought of mine, before I am so bold as to present an official request for TG4....
I wonder if any sizable number of TG users out there have this issue: often as I design environments, at some point I'm like - hmm, maybe I should check the scale I'm at. So I create a cube object, size it to roughly human dimensions, and copy a location in the view and paste that location to the cube (the cube is actually TWICE the height of a roughly average human, since the cube's origin is centered, which means pasting a cube at a certain point means half the cube is below that point).
..and my rough idea of the scale of my landscape, or a feature therein, turns from a "sort of big" preconception to the realization that it is actually MASSIVELY MASSIVELY MASSIVELY HUGE.
Oops. Guess I should adjust, tweak, or give up my thought for another, or try to run everything at that massive massive massive scale.
What I was thinking was, wouldn't it be nice to have something built into TG where you could right-click somewhere in the scene, and an option in the pop-up menu would be "Place Mannequin", and a rough, very low-poly human (maybe like the wood mannequin artists use to pose and draw from - mind you I am NOT suggesting any ability to pose, just a standing figure) would be placed on the ground, center of object at feet so it's perfectly positioned..?
Slightly more thought:
- It might be useful, instead, for there to be just a Mannequin menu that, when selected, opens a second-menu listing "1x, 1.5x, 2x" for simple, two-click (three counting the initial right-click) placement at useful scale, as sometimes people may work at slightly larger scales to accommodate fine details more easily.
- A static object could be used for the Mannequin, meaning only one exists per TG instance, preventing your scenes from having unwanted nodes and a bunch of those lazy-a## mannequins hanging around. In this case, simply selecting the Mannequin menu item would move the existing one to the new location. Also, if none exists, it could simply create one at the default (1x ?) scale and drop it into position, sparing everyone the agonizing tedium of two-clicking every time they want a standard scale mannequin.
And of course the object's info-window (lack of better term there) would allow the usual options given to other primitives.
This could just as easily be a cube with pre-set dimensions, but I felt a low-poly figure would be kind of nice. To that end, it might be cool if the figure had one hand up above the brow like someone blocking out the sun while looking into the distance
As it stands, this is a functionality that is certainly doable without it being built into TG. My interest is simply in the workflow of things. It would make it a simple thing to drop in a scale reference without messing with the sizing, or re-focusing on it to move it somewhere else during
designing your next masterpiece.
Thanks for your time!