warp

[roseman]

I've been trying out warp.  A wonderful program.  Here are some comments/suggestions.

I get real problems when I load in an object which lies in a coordinate plane.  (for example,  
I was using polarGrid in /u/roseman/gc/SpinningAndTwisting/polarGrid).

 The problem is obvious--the 3x3x3 grid appears to be a 3x3 grid.  One can get into real  
trouble by moving these widgets around.  for example if one moves Point_1_1_0,  
Point_1_1_0,l and Point_1_1_0 away from their original position by a sizable amount,  
(one can select them and move them) then the result  can "tear the geom  
asunder"--strange roundoff errors etc must be happening.  But of course we are moving  
two copies of the same point to two different positions and "expecting" a reasonable  
picture to be presented.

Perhaps such planarity--and even a near planar case be handled by giving the user a  
planar set of widgets.

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Is there any way to make sure the (dumb) user does not warp a widget ?  Yes there is a  
warning in the man pages but I find it hard to remember.  This comes having targegeom  
the default in the warp panel , moving a widget and asking it to warp.

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I can deduce what a widget is, but in the man page in the first pp it might be clearer if it  
read something like 


 Warp  is  a Geomview external modulae allowing the user to
       interactively deform OOGL objects through the movement  of
       a  group  of arbitrarily placed control points.  These control points are represented  
graphically by geoms called widgets.  


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It might be nice to have a method that would hide the widgets.  Suppose one were to do  
frames for an animation.  One would want to take frames without (visable) widgets, then  
turn them on again to do the next frame.

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It might help to have different widgets look a little different--it  is some times hare to  
mentally keep track of which they are without selecting on and looking up its name.  For  
example a color scheme or shape differences, or both.  (at least as an option.)

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p.s.  having more complex widgets is also an important idea in a 4-dimensional version of  
warp--more about this idea later.