Manipulators
Manipulators
Manipulators are a set of interactive tools for controlling transformations of objects. Letting users manipulate objects interactively on the screen is far more intuitive than trial and error tweaking of numbers in pursuit of suitable values. The most common transformations are translation,rotation, and scale. Manipulators are presented to users as widgets attached to objects and by interacting with these widgets the transformation parameters are changed. Many modeling packages, e.g. Maya, offer some form of interactive manipulation of objects. The manipulators shown here were implemented from scratch, using C++ and OpenGL, for Naiad Studio. Rotation was implemented using the famous ArcBall quaternion methods.
Images
Tommy Hinks 