I have been suggested to make a thread about the feature I’d like to implement in Krita. This is to have some discussion going and maybe hints for implementing it.
The idea is to extend the assistant tool for making orthogonal projections the way I was taught in the drawing class back in high school: front, top, and side. I’d like to do away with the need for sketching lines every time. Instead, I could designate the central point in between the quadrants and see projection guides real-time as I move the cursor. Like this:
From what I understand you want to have a tool where you can put the cursor on any point in a view and it shows a guide line to the corresponding point to all the other views, right? I’m not sure this can be implemented without the program having any sense of three dimensions and a fancy input device like a 3D-Mouse.
Take the point you marked as cursor on the top view. You have only the X an Z-axis here but you need an additional point in at least one of the other views to mark the location on the Y-axis. Without it, if you have your cursor on a point in the top view, the program can’t calculate the guide because it can be anywhere on that axis.
So I’m afraid you can’t have dynamic guides like the perspective tool has. What you can do of course is set pairs of coordinates in two views and than make the program draw static guides. This is actually quite simple math. And I think that would be a useful tool. I too find drawing the guides quite tedious and rarely do projections because of that. If I could just set two points and the program draws the guides, that would be a nice time saver. I think Blender already has a similar tool, it does not show guides however (if I remember correctly) only has the four different views.
It’s not intended to have all the guides for all the three dimensions. In this case, when the cursor is on the top view, the vertical dimension is not relevant, since you’re drawing on the XZ plane only.
Yes, but where do your guides go then? If all you need is a single line that “connects” front an top or top and side view you can just use two parallel rulers of the assistant tool and make them perpendicular to rach other. Voila, you have dynamic guides (if “show paint assistant” is on under the view menu), no need to program anything. Or maybe I misunderstood what your new feature should achieve.
Would love to see this!