Update Aug 9: Pivot Editor: Full Release
The Pivot Point Beta released a couple months ago. We haven’t made a lot in the way of updates since then, but behind the scenes we’ve been hard at work solving the issues that you brought up after trying out the beta.
Today, we’re excited to announce a large set of changes to the beta, addressing the majority of your feedback!
If you’ve turned the beta off, please give it another shot, and if you haven’t tried the beta yet you can try it out by turning on the “Pivot Editor” beta in the Beta Features dialogue:
Hold Tab → Summon Handles
I’ll start with the change that we’re most excited to announce.
When we introduced the Pivot Point beta we modified the Move handles to be positioned directly around the pivot. We received feedback that many devs found this handle placement awkward for accurately positioning parts. We had thought that moving the pivot to the area you’re working on would be a solution, but you found that too slow a workflow. We still wanted to draw the handles around the pivot (because future dragger features like planar drag will work more cleanly that way), but needed a way to ensure that manipulation is convenient for you.
What we came up with is a unique-to-Roblox solution that we’ve dubbed “Handle Summoning”. Suppose that you’re trying to Move, Resize, or Rotate a part, and the handles are not within view on the screen. Now you can simply hold the tab key, and the handles of the tool you have selected will be summoned directly to the location of your cursor, where you can use them to manipulate the selected objects. When you’re done, you release the tab key, and the handles will return to their normal location:
Rotating objects around a temporary pivot rather than a permanently edited one is another feedback item that we frequently received. We had held back on promising this, as we couldn’t find a clean understandable way to offer it, but Handle Summoning has solved this! When summoning the rotate handles, the selection will be rotated around the point that you summoned them to. This offers a quick way to rotate objects around the edges/vertices of your geometry – if you place your cursor close to an edge or vertex when summoning, the handles will snap to that edge or vertex:
The Scale handles can also be summoned for consistency. We debated having them behave like Move/Rotate but settled for a tweaked behavior where summoning keeps them within the bounds of selected object as we thought it’d be more predictable. We’d love your feedback about this behavior.
Pivot Point Indicator Visibility
Being able to hide the pivot indicator is the most requested Pivot Editor feedback item. We do still want to show the pivot indicator unconditionally (to increase future design flexibility), but we’ve made a couple of adjustments to address the concerns where its visibility was obtrusive. Please let us know whether you’re satisfied with these adjustments or still want a way to hide it:
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Pivot Indicator hidden for multi-selections: The indicators are now hidden when you have multiple objects selected. This significantly reduces visual clutter, at no loss of useful information, since the pivot location only impacts tool behavior when you have a single object selected.
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Pivot Indicator only shown contextually: The pivot indicator is now only shown when you have a tool which uses it for something selected. That means that if you select objects with the Select tool or other non-dragger tools in Studio you will no longer see the pivot indicator. (Community plugins can show the pivot indicator if they use pivots by setting
ShowPivotIndicator = trueon theDraggerService)
Pivot Point of a Multi Selection
You may already have seen this change a couple of weeks ago, but we’ve modified the dragger behavior in cases where you have multiple objects selected. Your feedback for multi-selections was clear: It is more convenient for the effective pivot to be the center of the bounding box of all the selected objects rather than the pivot of the most recently selected object. We now use the center of the bounding box in that case.
Small Tweaks
We’ve made many other small numeric tweaks to the visuals and behavior, including:
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When setting the pivot with the Edit Pivot tool and Pivot Snapping enabled, the snap points now vary in size to reduce visual clutter, and you can set their color in the Studio settings dialogue (“Geometry Snap Color”) if their default color conflicts with your environment.
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Made some minor adjustments to how the draggers handle edited pivots in Physical mode. We’re still looking to tweak this further and are very interested in feedback from developers who use the Physical dragger mode frequently.
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The Move (and Scale) handles behave much better when dragging far off-axis or beyond the horizon. Previously the selection would sometimes jump backwards in the direction opposite of the drag in those cases, now it should never do this.
Thanks for your patience waiting for updates to the beta!
very nice update and a win for the devs!