Request: Alternate viewport navigation style

[Roger_K]

I find that when working on characters it can be very hard to navigate accuratly in 3d brush. especially around areas like the hands and head which are too far from the pivot point.

A nice idea that silo uses in its viewport navigation is the camera lookat point is automaticly projected onto the mesh directly under the cursor as you navigate. This makes it really easy to get in close to the point where you can get inside the mouth and work away or indeed detail between the fingers with very accurate viewport manipulation with far less awkward panning to re position the views pivot point.

how i think 3dc and Silo differ is that 3dc's camera feels like its rotating around its COG where as silo's is rotation around a lookat point attached to the mesh

heres a video of what i mean

[Andrew Shpagin]

Now the pivot point is last drawing point. I easily can change it to last mouse over point.

edit: have done it. It seems navigation has become more easy and intuitive.

[yukon_28]

i like how uvlayout deal with pivots. When you point on polygon and press home it moving pivot to center of that polygon and zooms at it. When you do the same at empty area it moving pivot to the center of object and zooms out. End key do the same to whole bounding box of uv shell.

Also max's new working pivot feature is very usefull, when you actualy get 2 independent pivots and switching between them by hotkey. So i'd like to get some hotkey in 3DC for fast moving pivot and (optionaly) zooming to polygon you are pointing with you mouse.

One more thing - is there any hotkey in 3DC that centers object in a viewport, like a Z hotkey in max ? Maybe its already there and i simply cant find it?

Last thing - midle mouse button without alt pressed does not do anything, why not to pan with it, as in max?

[Roger_K]

Now the pivot point is last drawing point. I easily can change it to last mouse over point.

edit: have done it. It seems navigation has become more easy and intuitive.

yay

[Rene Damm]

As an addition to this, it would be great if moving pivots could be toggled off altogether, so that the pivot always stays at 0,0,0. The current model of grabbing the surface point under the mouse as the pivot makes simply spinning around a model quite difficult as with each rotation, the pivot will come closer to you as will the model.

An immovable pivot is also nice in so far as you don't have to care for where your cursor is when tumbling around. Viewport navigation should be something you don't have to think about.