Wings 3D/User Manual/Advanced Menus

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� Section 5.3 Advanced Men WINGS3D USER MANUAL 5.3 Advanced Menus We have put off discussion of advanced menus because it is generally agreed that new uses are best off leaving them alone until they have a firm grasp of basic Wings operations. However, I strongly recommend that you become proficient with the basic operations quickly and turn Advanced Menus on, and then leave them on forever since they offer so much additional modeling capability. Here we will discuss the Advanced Menu system, explain the mechanics of their use, and detail the advanced menu options available to you.

You can turn on the Advanced Menus by selecting that option in the Edit | Preferences Menu. After doing so you will see some changes to the Wings pop-up context sensitive menus. Most notably, the small sub-menu indicators on the right side of the menus change from small arrowheads to

small dots. This is your visual clue that Advanced Menus are enabled. Also, the Lift command becomes available in the Face Operations menu.

What Advanced Menus do for you is enable secondary selections. This does not sound all that significant at first, but it is. Just what a "secondary selection" is may need a little explanation. After making your primary selection, say you select an edge, normally you will be given options to manipulate that edge along its normal, free, or along the positive or negative X, Y, Z axis only. Sometimes you would like to use another axis, or vector, to work from. This is what enabling secondary selections does for you. It allows you to define just about any vector as the axis of operation for a given command. Consider the simple example presented in Figure 54.

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� WINGS3D USER MANUAL Section 5.3 Advanced Men Figure 54: Standard vs. Advanced Menus.

In the top two panels are screen shots taken with the standard menus on. In 54.a you can see that we can move the selected vertex along its Normal, Free, or in the X, Y or Z directions only. 54.b shows the result of moving the vertex along X by 0.5 units. Now take a look at panel 54.c, where Advanced Menus have been turned on, and compare it to panel 54.a. Notice two things

immediately. First the arrowheads in 54.a have become small dots in 54.c. Second, the messages on the status bar have changed dramatically. Be sure to pay attention to the status bar when modeling in Wings, especially when you have Advanced Menus on, for very important instructions are given there. In this case the status bar is telling you that a Left mouse click [L] will allow you

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� Section 5.3 Advanced Men WINGS3D USER MANUAL to move along the standard axis, just like normal, but that a Right mouse click [R] will allow you to select a user defined axis to move along. In panel 54.c we have clicked the Right mouse button and are now presented with a new interface which will allow us to make our secondary selections,

meaning that you can define virtually any vector with a bit of set up. It is also handy to note that if you only need one selection to define your vector you can use a single right click to select it and then drag to execute all at once.

Figure 55: The Wings magnets.

which in turn, will define our new axis (often referred to as a vector). Notice that the icon bar has changed to indicate that you can select vertices, edges or even faces to define this vector and the status bar is giving you new instructions (Panel 54.d). Make your selections (you can use more than one element to define the vector) with the Left mouse button and then Execute with the Right mouse button. Panel 54.e shows the newly defined axis as a thick blue line passing through the vertex we chose as the vector. Finally panel 54.f shows the result of a move along that axis, also by 0.5 units. As you can see, you get very different results. Note that you can use another object completely on which to make your secondary selections,

But that is not all that Advanced Menus do for you. By enabling Advanced Menus you also get access to the magnets in Wings. Remember in the example above we Right clicked on the Move command to enable secondary selections. We said if we left click we would get to work on standard axis only. But we also would see the magnets suddenly appear, as seen in Figure 55 below.

With Advanced Menus enabled, on many of the commands a Left click will reveal the Wings magnets as seen in Figure 55.a above. If you click on the actual command (Normal, Free, X, Y, or Z) you will work as normal without the magnets. But if you click on the little magnet icon to the right of the

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� WINGS3D USER MANUAL Section 5.3 Advanced Men command, then you will enable the magnets. Also notice that important instructions are being passed to you via the status bar once again.

In panel 55.a we have a vertex selected that we want to move but we want the movement to affect some of the surrounding vertices as well. So we left click on Move, which brings up the Move menu with magnets enabled. Then we hover over the magnet icon next to the X option and read the status line. The status bar tells us that we must use the left mouse button to define an area of influence, or fall off zone, for the magnet to affect, that a Middle mouse button click would allow us to enter a numeric radius as seen in Figure 56, and that a Right mouse button would use the last radius used. We then use the Left mouse button and select a set of vertices not too far from the initial selection, in this case three (one hidden from our current view) which results in a big blue dot as seen in panel 55.c. This dot indicates the center of the extent of our fall off zone. Now the status bar is giving new instructions, specifically, that you can begin the magnetic move with the Right click of the mouse. Panel 55.d shows the result of doing a magnetic Move. Keep in mind that you can use of the Middle mouse button to dolly around during this operation to get a good look at things as you go.

Further more, you can combine these two types of operations. You can define a vector and then Alt-Right Click to bring up a Vector+Magnet operation. Doing so bring up this little gem:

Figure 57: Vector Magnets revealed.

Just click on the little magnet icon and set up magnets as described before. You get the power of both vectors and magnets combined. Note that for users of Maya camera mode, Hold Ctrl instead of Alt while right-clicking. (This is shown in the help prompt in the status line.)

Finally, there is the new Face command, Lift, that becomes available when Advanced Menus are activated. The reasons Lift is only available with Advanced Menus is that it requires a secondary selection to use as the pivot for performing the lift. And secondary selections is what Advanced Menus are all about. Lift is explained in more detail in the following section.

Figure 56: The Influence Menu. Numeric entry of the magnetic fall off zone is accessed via the Middle mouse button.