Ola Madsen looks at creating surface constrains in Softimage that still allow you to use the translate tool to move the object about freely. Check out his Creating a Surface Constraint in Softimage While Keeping Translations Tutorial and downloadable scene file here.
Ola Madsen notes on his post: “While constraining an object to a surface as such is a straightforward task and won’t require more than a few mouse clicks, it may still leave you with a sensation of not being quite satisfied. Once you add the constraint you loose the option to freely move the object with the standard translate tool and are left with two (somewhat less intuitive) sliders within a PPG. By adding an extra dummy object to the mix, you’ll effectively manage to get the most out of both approaches.”
