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It seems that most 3D programs can never get a good mouse rotation system without gimbal lock, or restricted motion. Except one. Creo (previously ProEngineer) has without a doubt the best mouse rotation system I have ever seen. No gimbal lock, no restricted motion, very intuitive and fast. I waste more time trying to get things rotated properly in practically every other 3D program except 3D PDF. It's not as good as Creo's but once you figure it out, it's second best in my opinion. It's second best because once you click and hold the mouse button you are restricted...Until you release the button and choose another point to start a new rotation. In Creo, you can keep the mouse button down, and in swirling motions you can easily and quickly get to any desired angle.

It seems that in Octane, even if you choose another rotation point on the screen, nothing changes and you are stuck with the same restrictions as before.

You forgot blender in your list of praise. It has wonderful camera controls.

I agree though that the camera control in octane is terrible. I spend ages (and normally give up) trying to get the octane camera into the right place.

I never adjust my camera in Octane, I do it in Blender before I export. Gives me more control.

I am not familiar with Blender, but glad to hear that at least another program can join the limited ranks of good mouse navigation.

On my list of some of the worst...Lightwave, C4D, PolyTrans.

Maxwell, so, so.

3D-Coat, kinda OK.

Terragen, fairly decent until you start to get parallel with the ground plane.

Rhino is actually very good, I forgot to mention, except they brain fart in that once you release the mouse button, you have to go back and click the dumb rotation gadget again! WTF?! ). That's like a pro snowboarder leaving everyone in the dust and then hot-dogging it at the end and crashing before the finish line, coming in last!

steveps3 wrote:You forgot blender in your list of praise. It has wonderful camera controls.

I agree though that the camera control in octane is terrible. I spend ages (and normally give up) trying to get the octane camera into the right place.

+1

Octane camera navigation with a mouse is quite awful and limited.

treddie wrote:Creo (previously ProEngineer) has without a doubt the best mouse rotation system I have ever seen. No gimbal lock, no restricted motion, very intuitive and fast.

Agree a lot! love the way Creo allows full range of motion without gimbal lock, and without ever letting go... for modeling.

for rendering though - Creo doesn't actually lock up as up. And it's very common to want to keep vertical vertical.

so I usually open up the camera and set the camera up vector, and set the Y height to match the Y target. This way I'm looking flat, right at whatever I'm rendering.

Good point about Creo's render nav. I never liked their renderers though and have always relegated that task to a standalone app.
Funny how a company can get something so right, then muck it up in some other respect. Weird.

Part of the problem I think is that the camera controls in Octane are different than the ones in your 3D application, so you aren't used to them. Some people may prefer trackball style controls. Octane implements turntable style controls for mouse input. It restricts the camera to pointing 90° up or down because it keeps the up vector constant, but I can't imagine people needing to turn the camera upside down all the time. Something we should probably do is improving the behaviour when the camera up vector is different from [0, 1, 0] but we don't have anything on the roadmap for 1.50.

Likewise there is the targeted versus free camera. Octane has a targeted camera (if you rotate the camera it rotates around some fixed target point). A problem here is that if some exporter exports a camera with a target point way behind or in front of the scene you're stuffed. But in this case you can use the camera target picker to pick a more useful target.

--
Roeland

navigation has been a bit of a shock when I started Octane..it wasn't as fluid as what I was used to. But after a while I get better & it was reasonably useful =DDD after taht I've got a 3dMouse from 3dConnection & it simply changed everything - now it's a pleasure to navigate, even with left hand (pan, rotate, tilt - even all three at the same time =)

treddie wrote: On my list of some of the worst...Lightwave, C4D, PolyTrans.

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.