Currently, Shapr3D’s navigation behaves differently than other environments I am used to, which makes dealing with the camera infuriating vs. other environments. My needs will be different than others. Customization is the only reasonable way to handle these sometimes competing requirements that depend on history, parallel apps, and habit. Shapr3D also appears to be ignoring the navigation needs of users with disabilities, and a variety of associated navigation requests.
Ensuring navigation is smooth and easy is the foundation of any modeling environment.
Brief description of the outcomes that you expect from this feature:
I am literally waiting for the navigation issues to be solved in order to instantly subscribe. The current navigation is enraging lol.
What can’t you achieve without this feature?
Currently, clicks to orbit cause different behavior depending on their location, which causes the view either to center properly, or to wobble off screen because the camera orientation is moved by the click location.
Also, inability to create navigation presets and associate input devices is hindering my ability to use the hardware I have on hand to optimize navigation. These two concepts are related.
Suggestions for implementation:
BEST: As a customized shortcut (Mouse-Right-Click mapped to ‘Orbit Navigation Cube’
Custom mappings for navigation behaviors solves all of the other mentioned issues below as well. Some presets are nice, but customization beats all. Bottom line: Shapr3D already has the orbit mechanics I want, I just can’t use them reliably.
As a user preference: “Lock Orbit to Camera View” or “Lock Orbit to Navigation Cube”
As an axis settings customization added to the ‘Appearance’ Tab All this does is replicate the navigation cube behavior anywhere an orbit click event happens in the viewport. No other effect.
Add a Navigation tab and allow selection of a specific mouse input device for secondary navigation (a trackball) which would make navigation fantastic, and the above option.
See issues mentioning navigation view problems, and issues with lack of customization:
“I guess I would like some flexibility to define the actions for mouse use to match other PC tools.”
”would it be possible to make Zoom, Pan and Rotate navigation be done by 2, 3 and 4 finger press on the Microsoft precision touchpad.”
“I can overcome this by resetting the grid to the XY plane each time but might there be some logic in being able to control the ‘automatic’ behaviour of the rotation axis so it doesn’t necessarily have to change with a grid change but by request if needed to work on a particular component. I haven’t thought this through at all so there may be many reasons not to do this.”
“I would like this wonderful program to be able to customize navigation, since it’s very annoying to switch hotkey context between softwares especially when Shapr3d navigation shortcut is the opposite of zbrush”
”I’d like to second the request for customizable navigation gestures. And not just “make Shapr3d work like program XXX.” Let me assign an arbitrary modifier key and mouse button for each pan, rotate, and zoom motion.”
”Just wondering where we are on fully customizable navigation presets? People with disabilities are still constructive members of society, how wouldn’t you want to accommodate them if a powerful feature adds to a software’s featureset and helps them in the process?”
“It’s just not intuitive to me that’s all.”
“When creation tool is turned off, the pencil could rotate the viewport, instead of the finger, and you would access the sketch tools via the menu.”
”I’ve been using shapr for a while (8 months) for making quick concepts on the go, and its navigation still feels alien.”
@DavidU_Shapr3D If you want to see a video, grab the dropbox link in ticket 113480 - that shows the camera orbit mechanics problem.
I don’t even need those orbit mechanics corrected for Shapr to be usable, because the navigation cube already does exactly what I want. It’s just not reasonable for me to go mouse over and drag that tiny symbol every time I want predictable orbit mechanics. So being able to map a behavior (right click drag → orbit navigation cube) would solve my problem without creating a special accommodation…
And if you allow custom mappings, that opens the door for a variety of the other requests from people with disabilities and issues using their specific hardware.
The templates are great, but they do not solve the above problems.
For predictable orbiting, we provide view rotation by the arrow keys with Cmd/Ctrl by 15°, or press Shift too to make it 45° (see attached Mac screenshot).
orbiting in fixed increments with the keyboard is with respect… horrific, and I’d never pay for software that forced me to use such controls for a stable orbit.
Have you watched the video?
Do you understand the very specific suggestion I’m making? Have you used (for example) SketchUp or Rhino?
I understand your need, you want manual control over orbit center, instead of the heuristic currently employed by the app, as you find it hard to predict. We will look into the specific example you documented: why the axis takes precedent over the object, but I can already see how the current behaviour is useful for some, while annoy others, including yourself. Another option would be to offer the setting to always default to scene mass center vs smart heuristics, but this has some non-trivial implications too, so not as simple as it sounds.
Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, you could use one of the previously mentioned workarounds: dragging on the orientation cube in the top right corner, keyboard arrow rotation, or if you have access to the SpaceMouse, it indicates the chosen orbit center, so it offers some predictability.
The space mouse is horrible because it’s not positional like a mouse, so movement volume is dependent on time not a positional delta. It’s a joystick. Really doesn’t work well for my needs.
With regard to the view, I am explicitly not asking for changes to the orbit mechanics as they exist, for precisely the reason you point out: some people might want or need it, and you have already implemented stable view origin orbit with the cube.
The reason I took the approach of 1. Presenting this as a configuration issue and 2. Pointing out that solving my problem with configuration capability would also solve a wide variety of other accessibility problems, is instead of fighting for my specific way that fits my workflow, I fight for everyone’s opportunity to use the current capabilities fully.
The most frustrating aspect of the problem for me is that Shapr already does what I need, but because that is not accessible in a reasonable way I cannot use it for daily work. It’s slow and infuriating.
Making it accessible is the issue. Changing the view mechanics is not the issue.
Again, I really appreciate the engagement here, regardless of whether we agree. I will immediately subscribe when view mechanics aren’t unusable for me. Until then I’m stuck with SketchUp, which is abysmal by comparison… except the view mechanics work. If it gets too annoying I’ll just buy Rhino. Thanks!
