It would be great if the mouse wraps-around when it reaches the border of the screen. For eg. if you drag an object and your cursor reaches the border of the screen, your wouldn't be limited by that and you could go on with your movement. Because the actual problem is that you have to abort, zoom out or replace your cursor to a better place, and begin again the operation you wanted to do...

What I mean by wrap-around is that when the cursor reaches for eg. the left border of the screen, then it reapears on the right border of the screen.

I also suggested this on the feature request tracker:
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=282&group_id=9&atid=128

Gabriel

I am in opposition to this idea
(an option to turn it off would be the ticket)

The reason why is that I in my mind imagine where the cursor should be, and it moving to the side of the screen (or more likely, not moving at all) would get me confused. It is even worse when the cursor jumps to the center of the screen. I am opposed to moving my mouse further than I have to, and it moving across the screen will require me to think about where it is, and how to get it to where I want it to go, rather than the way it is now where I know where it is, and will be, and don't have to re-think about how to move it around.

(yes, I am that lazy)

in summary, I would find the cursor jumping around (at all) a distraction. If you get used to zooming out (or moving your mouse first) it isn't a problem that your mouse is confined to the screen.

I totally agree with this

I run into this problem every single blender session.
It's a break in the flow of productivity to have to cancel your scale command, reposition the mouse, and then try again.
mouse wrap around would improve flow, making things more "click->action" orientated, rather than "click->cancel->move mouse->click->action" orientated.

later BEAT

Well yes,

I see three possibilities:
- As now, normal movement of the cursor until the border is reached.
- Normal movement of the cursor, plus wrap-around if border is reached.
- The cursor stays where it is when grabbing, scaling, etc.

The first can cause a lot of cancel-retry that can be annoying and reduce productivity. The second one may cause a disorientation of where the cursor might be. The third possibility loses one information: it's useful to see the cursor move: Often when I have quickly to do some specific stuff such as alignment, I put my cursor at a strategic place before grabbing, rotating or scaling in order to have some kind of reference to another object.

So each one of these possibilities has a problem... After thinking a little, I thaught that the ideal solution could be to allow to continue the movement (for eg. grab) even if the cursor reached the border. The cursor would stay at the border of the screen, but the selected object would still be able to contiue to move when you move your mouse. The old behaviour doesn't change, it's just extended.

IMHO that's the ideal solution, what do you think?

Gabriel

I seem to remember 3D Studio MAX had this feature when I used it last, but can't remember. Just to clarify, the wrap-around would only occur when you're in the middle of an operation such as moving, panning, scaling etc. It wouldn't happen just in normal use of the program such as moving your mouse around over buttons etc.

I like this idea, and it would certainly make using the (for example) scale, rotate, shear, options in the menu bar a lot more useful since when you use the menu, often the mouse cursor is near the edge of the screen.

When you talk about wrapping around if border is reached, are you thinking about border of the whole Blender window or border of current windo (3d window, Ipo window, Text window, etc.)? If the cursor wraps only inside the one window (eg. 3d window) it's not so confusing. But the ability to choose the mouse behawiour will be the best sollution, don't you think?

How about this. When the mouse reaches the edge of the current 3d window during an operation (like scaling, rotating, shearing etc..) the current screen zooms out with the cursor still at the edge so you can continue to see the selected object in the screen while you complete your operation. When you release the button, it zooms back to the starting view point.

Cheers
J

to broken:
Yes, I think that you're right, it's good to think if the new features are also "newbie-proof".

to xvoodoo:
I thaught about a whole screen wrap-around, but yes it would be better if it's only an active window wrap-around. But I think that the wrap-around isn't really useful if we decide that the movement continues even if the cursor reached the border and stays there. But that's my opinion.

cgul:
Yes that's a great idea! Even better I think!!

Since I'm not really a coder, let's hope that someone will be motivated to implement that one day...

Gabriel

Try using the mousewheel to zoom out when you hit the edge of the screen.

Chris

Hos wrote:

Try using the mousewheel to zoom out when you hit the edge of the screen.

Well that doesn't help. Try it out: of your pointer is at the border of the screen, even by zooming out with the mousewheel, you won't have more liberty of movement afterwards. I tryed it with grab and scale, for both the mousewheel doesn't help in this specific case.

Gabriel

diz wrote:

Well that doesn't help. Try it out: of your pointer is at the border of the screen, even by zooming out with the mousewheel, you won't have more liberty of movement afterwards. I tryed it with grab and scale, for both the mousewheel doesn't help in this specific case. Gabriel

Grab works here ... it doesn't move your mouse pointer away from the border, but the thing
you are grabbing moves farther away from the center of the screen (in a world space
sense), and hence it is being positioned beyond the periphery of the previous screens'
dimensions (which is the goal you want to achieve).

Doing this with scale doesn't work so well, but that could probably be easily modified.

Chris

Well, I agree wrapping would be nice...

Dani

Just please have an option to turn wrapping off. It drives me nuts in 3ds max when the cursor wraps around the screen (yes, that's still in there).

I personally like diz's "ideal solution" -- it provides a compromise between continuation of workflow and predicting where the mouse is. My mind remembers the cursor position as z3r0_d described, so eliminating unexpected cursor movement would be ideal.

Another problem involves dual monitors. If I move an object to the right, the mouse will not stop at the edge of the Blender window that is maximized on the first monitor. It will continue traveling onto the second monitor, and the "accept changes" mouse click will not register in the Blender window. A combination of diz's and xvoodo's ideas would solve this problem -- stop the mouse movement at the edge of the active Blender window (e.g. 3d window, etc) but continue the active transform.

Matt

meestaplu wrote:

A combination of diz's and xvoodo's ideas would solve this problem -- stop the mouse movement at the edge of the active Blender window (e.g. 3d window, etc) but continue the active transform.

Yes, I agree that would be the best compromize!

Gabriel

great idea I want it !

broken: it's defenatly a max function, or something like it