3.023 which is ready for download has had many improvements made while being worked through for the: Modelling a Mouth with Lips for our Animated Character and other upcoming tutorials.
The Palette window's blend colour strip now has 2 modes. quad-blend which is the same as in previous versions and now bi-blend which shows the blended colours as strips of 2 blended colours. Bi-blend ensures the blending between only two colours instead of possibly 4. Toggling between bi-blend and quad-blend can be done using the quadBlend checkbox.
Colour tabs can now be set by right clicking on the tab and selecting: set this color tab
Pressing the ` key also known as the grave accent key or backtick key, the key just below the Esc key, turns off the visual aid such as the nurbs patch cages. This is very handy if we want to see our work with the cages hidden without messing up our selection of hidden and shown cages. Pressing the back quote key restores the visual aid. Most functions will also restore the visual aid.
Copy and paste buttons have been added to the ColorSweep's control panel so that ColorSweep data can be copied from one ColorSweep and pasted to another.
"export selected patches" is working again.
Some time ago control points were made not to jump to the exact location the user clicks at the beginning of dragging a control point. This makes it easier for the artist to make fine adjustments.
This feature was apparently not being utilised for NurbsLathes but is now.
To prevent unwanted structures being made, the user is prevented from merging 2 mirrored twinless NurbsPatches when the user selects east or west edges for both patches.
When importing patches all the cages for the imported patches are set to show and are selected.
Crashes have been prevented when the user attempts the combination of setting a Stem's Bands field to 1 and the beginSP and endSP fields both to true.
When grouping patches using the group button, the new GroupBuild will reference the selected GroupBuild's part or the part from the parent group from a selected patch.
The file import window has a button added to reset the folder to the location of the main file.
The transform control points control panel has two buttons added, one to reset the transform fields and recalc the pivot point and the other to reset the x components of the pivotPoint and translation fields.
The transform control points control panel automatically opens for importing patches/items in modelling mode.
Delete control line has been made much faster
A ColorSweep bug has been fixed that would cause a crash if the user attempted to manually add colour points using the length button.
When merging two patches, a ColorSweep will always be retained if only one patch had it.
Code has been added to ensure a patch will remain selected after merging two patches.
A Bone Picker mode has been added to the paint tool bar. This is used much the same as the Colour Picker except a part node is selected when the user clicks on polygons in the model instead of colours.
The user no longer has to be zoomed out enough for snapLever to work.
The user must be closer to the center line on the grid than in previous versions when adding a sphere, box, lathe etc. if they want to add a single shape in mirror mode. In previous versions the distance was too great for adding objects like eyeballs without adding them at a greater distance than one would intuitively guess.
Hopefully less chance of a crash from a ColorSweep and stem popup windows. Seems stable now.