Hope you are having wonderful holidays. It has been an eventful year for us at 3DTin. In 2011 we converted our browser based humble voxel editing program into something that can create 3D models comparable to desktop CAD tools.
Before 2011 ends though, we want to release one more enhancement to 3DTin.
As you can tell, 3DTin’s workspace is primarily discrete. That is, the geometries are aligned at discrete edges of the grid. They cannot be moved continuously. This restriction is helpful (although sometimes annoying), because you don’t have to worry about accurate placement of geometries. When we introduced geometry rotation, we followed the same philosophy and allowed rotations in multiples of 90º. Besides, there wasn’t much point in allowing arbitrary rotations, when you could not merge geometries into each other. But that has changed. Now you can merge geometries. Therefore it makes lot of sense to allow continuous rotations.
Now when you select a geometry, you will see a new context window as below.
When you click on the rotation icon (red circle), you will see the rotation controls appear. They contain a slider at the bottom of the context window (green rectangle). You can move the slider to rotate the geometry through any angle you want. There are also two icons if you quickly want to rotate through 90º, just like old days. As you change the angle the geometry will rotate. Moreover the degree callout window (green rectangle) will show the actual number of degrees being applied. In case you want to give specific number of degrees and slider’s resolution falls short, then you can click on the degree callout window and it will prompt you to enter the degrees with text entry.
The continuous rotation combined with geometry merging gives ample opportunity to create interesting models.
Check out these couple of examples that demonstrate what you can do with continuous rotation.
The first one shows a fan whose blades are rotated 45º and then merged with the central arms. The second one is an abstract sculpture with the Tapered pipe geometry rotated at 60º angle.
Note that, the continuous rotation cannot be applied to cube-groups. If you want brick shaped structures to be rotated through arbitrary angles, you should make them from the Box template instead of cubes.
The new design of the context window uses a new set of icons for actions like clone, flip, 2x, edit, etc. All the functionality is unchanged though.
3DTin 
Great job. I really appreciate your work. It is very helpful for 3d Modeling. Keep it up.