After a lengthy beta period, the Dragger QoL Beta will soon be coming to a close. Thanks for all your feedback during the process!
Today we’ve enabled the beta by default for 100% of Studio users.
Late September we’ll be removing the beta, opt-out will no longer be possible.
If you have any feedback you had not given yet in the original beta thread, please let us know as soon as possible to avoid disruption when we remove the beta.
Key changes summary
For those of you who are seeing the beta for the first time now, here’s a brief overview of the changes most likely to impact your workflow. (If you want an exhaustive description of all the added features, see the original announcement linked at the top of the post)
Core changes
While hovering over parts with a dragger selected, you’ll see a “ruler” which hints at the orientation / size of the part under your cursor. This can be disabled via the “Show Hover Ruler” Studio setting (but give it a try before you disable it, the majority of beta users liked it!).
Tilt / Rotate are now animated. If you dislike animation in your tooling, you can set the “Tilt/Rotate Animation Duration” setting to 0.
The draggers include a box telling you the precise distance you’ve Moved / Scaled / Rotated by. If you freehand things and don’t need this, it can be disabled via the “Show Numeric Measurements” setting.
Hotkey changes
Selecting the Draggers uses just 1/2/3/4 instead of Ctrl+1/2/3/4. You can change the shortcuts back in File → Advanced → Customize shortcuts… if you’d rather keep including Ctrl.
Uniform scaling with the Scale tool is now bound to Alt / Opt instead of Shift so that Shift can act as a shared “disable snapping” keybind. There is no setting for this, you will unfortunately have to adjust to the new hotkey.
There are now default hotkeys to toggling Move and Part snapping: Shift+X and Shift+C. If you had already set a hotkey for toggling Move snapping you’ll keep the one you chose.
Snapping changes
There are now side by side “Move” and “Snap to Parts” toggles in the ribbon bar. Move snapping controls traditional snapping of parts to a grid. “Part snapping” controls the snapping of parts to the geometry of other nearby parts. Disabling part snapping will make the tools snap similarly to how they used to.
Settings menu changes
There is a new “Selection” section in the Studio settings menu. Existing selection related settings have been moved there, and settings related to the draggers have been added.
Many of the new dragger UX additions can be disabled or customized in this Selection section. If something isn’t to your liking, check for an option in the settings.
Known issues
If you’re currently using the “Next Gen Studio UI” beta feature, the new ribbon layout does not include a “Snap to Parts” checkbox. The next gen Studio UI will be updated to include this soon. In the meantime, you can still use the Shift+C hotkey to toggle this even though it is not visible.
Your feedback is invaluable as we release and continue making changes. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or notable experiences!
Is there any chance there could be rebindable keybinds at some point across Studio, which would include the draggers? Right now there’s only checkboxes for some common changes that are possible, but it would be nice to be able to bind things like Rotate and Tilt to special actions for use with different HID devices like controllers.
I think it is a terrible decision to move the snap to parts checkbox away from the ribbon and into studio settings, when its a setting that many would use both on and off throughout development. Moving it to a less accessible location means that development will take much longer when having to use this setting.
Please consider moving it back to the ribbon!
I really like the new ruler and drag distance, however the rotation animation I extremely dislike and don’t see ANY use for, when precision is vital for development, and any kind of animation obscuring the precision will be incredibly confusing for new and existing developers. Please consider making this setting’s default value 0.
Another huge criticism I have is that the new ruler does not respect the use of the alt keybind to select children of models, as it continues to snap to the hitbox of the model.
The ruler should also only snap to physical objects and not the model hitbox.
Keybinds for this stuff are difficult at the moment for a couple of reasons:
Press-to-action things such as T/R are relatively easy to add keybindings for, however those keybindings would be plugin specific the way the plugin infrastructure is currently designed: You’d have to rebind the key individually for each of Select / Move / Scale / etc separately. That’s what stopped us from including bindings so far.
Hold-to-action things such as holding shift / control are unreasonably difficult to make customizable thanks to the Qt UI framework not having any native concept of a hold-hotkey, only press hotkeys. It would be possible to work around this but the implementation cost is high and hasn’t been paid yet.
As the ability of Studio to have better customization overall evolves we’ll make sure the draggers plug into it. Getting better hotkey customization would be one of those things.
It is still in the ribbon.
Are you using the Next Gen Studio UI beta? Known issue that it is not present there yet, it will be added soon. There’s some details of the exact UI design to work out which we didn’t want to hold up this beta further over but it will be included in the Next Gen ribbon layout soon.
Are there any plans to allow disabling this yellow dragger thing?
also maybe changing the “alt” key from doing this?
I used to hold alt to select parts within a model to freely move them around, now when holding alt, i’m unable to rotate stuff, so perhaps we could have “initial operation” changed to ctrl instead?
No. That’s the minimal UX to show you why the part is dragging the way it is. We could add a toggle for it but we’d rather it be minimal enough that creators don’t feel the need to disable it.
You don’t have to hold alt down the whole time you’re dragging even if you use alt to click and drag the individual part within the model. Also, the use initial orientation keybind only has any effects while you’re holding the key down.
That means that as long as you make sure to release Alt before pressing R you be able to use the tool in the same way you did before. Though yes, that might be a slight adjustment to muscle memory.
No. That’s the minimal UX to show you why the part is dragging the way it is. We could add a toggle for it but we’d rather it be minimal enough that creators don’t feel the need to disable it.
Could there still be a setting to disable it? I understand why its there, but i just prefer to have it off.
I’d also really like to see a numerical box display alongside the ruler (much like when moving or rotating parts) to show how long each ruler axis actually is, and I’d also like an option or keybind toggle to draw rulers in both directions of each axis as this could be immensely useful for lining up parts relative to other parts!
When this is done, there should be an indication as to which the primary axis direction is that the ruler is being drawn from (especially when parts may not perfectly fit into the move distance snapping)
There also appears to be a bug or odd design choice where after a certain number of ruler snap lines the lines are no longer drawn at all, and only the central line remains. I find this really odd and would appreciate if this was disabled or made into a setting.
Can we also please have a keybind to toggle the rulers? While they’re incredibly useful, they can also be extremely distracting when not being used, and the ability to toggle them while developing would be very helpful!
You got a particular use case where you need more than what it shows up to? What do you typically have your grid snap set to? The idea behind the limit was to reduce clutter since after a certain count of lines you wouldn’t be able to quickly judge the size of the object regardless.
Say you want to have objects lined up against another object every x distance, you will want the cross-rulers to continue being displayed even if you cannot see all of them to line them up. While yes you could also use the snapping distance tool for this, this quickly doesnt work for objects of different sizes or where you want to vary this distance, and it would also generally be a nice alternative to quickly do this without having to touch the snapping distance at all!
It would be nice if this was a setting to set the limit as to how many cross rulers (or whatever they’re to be called) are displayed before they stop being displayed, or more usefully only display cross-rulers nearby the cursor dot on the object? The latter option here I think would be useful, especially for reducing unnecessary rendering, however I understand if that’s not easily possible, so the option to choose how many are rendered before they stop would be a very handy setting.
Possibly related, but what on earth is the yellow box shown when dragging parts for? It just randomly draws from a random point that has no relation to the part. How can it be disabled?
Edit: This appears to be Show Snap Targets, yet why is it drawing from a random point along one edge of the snap target, and not from any kind of significant point such as a corner or the centre?
