Wings 3D/User Manual/User Interface/The Information String

DRAFT 1.6 15

� Section 2: The Wings3D User Interface WINGS3D USER MANUAL 2.8 The Information String If you have an element of geometry selected Wings will display some basic information on that element (or elements) in a string at the top left-hand side of the workspace.

2.9 Wings Units A Wings Unit (wu) is arbitrary in size and can be thought of in terms of any real world units desired. The Wings grid is composed of squares each 1x1 wu in size. The standard Wings cube is cube is 2 x 2 x 2 Wings Units in size. If building a model from scratch you can arbitarily decide that a wu will represent inches, feet, meters or miles; whichever is most appropriate for the task at hand.

Quick Tip: Working With Wings Units

When working with many Wings commands dragging with the Shift key depressed will cause movement to be constrained to whole units, while the Ctrl key will cause movement to be constrained to tenths of units. Holding down Shift + Ctrl keys constrains operations to hundredths of a wings unit. While it seems the same as the readout – as this is only 2 decimal places – it is possible to do unconstrained drags and get elements that are 3 decimal places when measured, even though the read out only shows two. Had me tearing my hair out on more than one occasion. Where it matters I use Shift + Ctrl.

The color of this text is set in the Edit | Preferences menu via the Text Color parameter. If you find this text string annoying you can hide it by simply changing the text color to match the background color of the workspace. I do not recommend this course of action since you can glean some useful information here. If you select an element, a vertex for example, Wings will inform you of the Vertex ID and it's position in X, Y, and Z. Furthermore, if you select another vertex, so that two are selected at the same time, it will tell you how far apart they are. If you select a single edge it will tell you how long that edge is. This can be very useful, especially in modeling buildings and the like.

It is not uncommon for Wings units and other 3D packages units to be vastly different in size. Therefore you will need to experiment with the import/export sizing options to get suitably sized objects on import/export. Scaling by 1000, for example, brings in a Poser model at a decent working scale.

Quick Tip Provided by Puzzled Paul