Feature request: Mouse rotations w/o restricted motion

[treddie]

LW camera nav couldn't be better. Surely you must have been stoned the couple times you were in LW Treddie. I have only used Blender a handful of times as middleman to WebGL - but when I say that Blender is the biggest steaming turd - with the most horrific interface I've seen - I have legions of other Blender-haters to back me up.

I'm not a Blender guy, so you misquote me. I only use it because it is the only program I have found that has a decent displace deformer...Takes a bump map and turns the grayscale into actual physical changes in the mesh. Other than that, it just sits on my computer.

Unless you have tried Creo/ProEngineer you don't know what you're missing nav wise, so it is hard to make a judgement about something you haven't tried. LW11 was gimbal lock city...You had to use a key with the mouse to get it out of it. Creo has no gimbal lock whatsoever. But each person has their own preference that is for sure. Many people don't like LW. It has an awful obj exporter that likes to dump seemingly random textures, for one.

Not many people in the viz business use Creo/ProE so not many people here can comment on whether or not they like its nav.

I've got a 3dMouse from 3dConnection & it simply changed everything

I've never tried a 3D mouse. That could be awesome!

[FrankPooleFloating]

I did mean that tongue-in-cheek Treddie. I am not really mad. It is just that (don't tell the wifey) Lightwave is my mistress -- of over ten years. I get a little bent out of shape when folks diss my girl. All good pal. Yes, gimble lock really sucks when it happens - but I have only had it happen a couple times and not once in years. I must be doing something right. Animating along paths and using nulls for look-at might be part of that.

Since we are kind of on the subject, I have to say, once and for all, that I am completely mystified why any 3D apps use icons in their interface. It has always seemed, well, childish, that Blender, Max, Maya, Cinema4D, Modo et al all use icons. It kind of feels like they are made for folks with learning disabilities or something. Every time I have worked in anything that uses icons and not text, I find myself having to actually think about what thing is what, rather than it being a completely instantaneous recognition of what I am looking for. This might very well be the one thing I love about LW most.

[treddie]

No offense taken, good man.

I used to be a LW guy during the v5-v6 era. I liked it at the time. I STILL love its GUI layout...one of the most logical IMHO. I am a C4D guy these days only because it was the only program I found that could properly deal with importing and exporting obj files with Octane Standalone as the destination (OK, so long as Riptide does the import and Octane does the export! ). I hated C4D's GUI at first...very convoluted. But I'm used to it now.

Right after my LW days I really got into solid modeling and ProEngineer for the ability to modify models without a lot of the headache found with meshes. Unfortunately, it has a serious drawback as far as obj export is concerned in that you cannot "cage" the mesh and make it any resolution you want on the fly. So no LOD manipulation in a scene. You have to export each mesh to the resolution you require. That is a limitation of the exporter and not ProE. Unfortunately, engineering apps don't pay much attention to the quality of their import/export filters.

I am completely mystified why any 3D apps use icons in their interface

Heheh...My feelings exactly! It's like they try to create international, universal symbols for everything. Only problem is...there ARE no international universal symbols for everything on a GUI! So you waste time memorizing which icons mean what. LW is great in that respect..."Absolutely Icon Free!" (They should put that in a dayglo starburst on the box. The GUI is simple and incredibly easy to learn.

I also agree with you about the sorry state of Blender. Very strange layout, and a go-against-the-grain approach to so many things. Like horizontal scrolling of directories that don't appear unless you move the scrollbar just right. I like when people think out of the box, but not when it as at the expense of tried and true methods that don't need replacement.

[treddie]

One big annoyance I have with programs in general is I wish everyone would agree on some navigation standards. One program uses MMB with Shift Key for this, another uses RMB with Cntrl Key for that. When I'm dancing back and forth between programs I am often thinking in terms of some other program and its totally annoying, especially if their undo capability is not so thorough. Cntl-Z and Cntl-V or quite universal. Why can't agreement go further? Some universal international standard?