Ctrl with bmConnect

Tom Foster

I've always found the Ctrl feature, to toggle between the 3 different bmConnect options, very difficult to actuate. I have to hit Ctrl many times, like 20x, before it has any effect. About half the times the black graphical bar doesn't appear, but that doesn't prevent the connection eventually changing, between the connected entities. Is it supposed to be possible to click on the desired option on the black bar? That has no effect, for me.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

There can be a bit of a delay before the Tips widget shows and displaying the various solutions also takes some time. A lot depends on the complexity of your model, the capacities of your computer (graphics card) and the visual style you use. If you switch to the 2dWireFrame visual style you will see a more instantaneous response.
Working with the BIM visual style it helps to reduce the ANTIALIASSCREEN setting to 0 and if you use glass in your model it is best to switch of that layer while modeling.

You can only click on the 'X' button in the widget, clicking on the actual options does not work. This has initially confused me as well.

I personally find that the widget has too much margin and that some of the icons can be hard to read. A more compact presentation and icons with a white background such as used in the Quad would be better IMO.

Scott McKenzie

On the mechanical side of things I enjoyed using it, but I did notice that there was sometimes a delay where the first press of the CTRL key didn't make the setting change, but I couldn't reproduce it reliably.  My only suggestion would be to have the tips toolbar remember your last selection mode and option, that way you press the CTRL key only when you need to change it, decreasing keystrokes and increasing efficiency - a good example is deleting threaded holes from a part where you couldn't do it in one selection window because you need to re-orient the view the make the second selection without selecting too many extra edges or faces.