turntable -- feature request

[makeshiftwings]

I've never actually been figure out how the turntable option makes a difference. What is ctrl-alt mousewheel supposed to do? It just zooms in my default setup (Win-2.36)

I love the way you can spin around any axis so easily in fact. Most others that I've seen you have to go somewhere to click on a button or gadget to switch to 'move the viewport' rather than using a gesture.

If you want to keep the spin even, isn't starting the spin with the mouse in the middle of the window the same thing? You can use the Num keys if you need to keep it exact, although I guess that's just from the viewport point of view.

ALT-MMB might be a good key for this functionality if somebody does do it. Ctrl for zoom, Shift for move, and add Alt for Rotate - doesn't seem to do anything now.

You can usually keep it even if you start in the exact center of the screen with the middle mouse button, but it's impossible to tell where that is most of the time, and as you continue to work, it eventually becomes lopsided, and you need to reset your view and start all over again. I know you can use various keyboard commands to turn it but all of those turn it in "steps"; they lack the fine control you can get when using the mouse. There is a difference in Turntable and Trackball, you can see it if you drag up and down from the far edges of the screen. Niether of them are useful to me.

I've never modelled anything where I needed to keep looking at it from different z angles; if i needed to, i would just tilt my head in that direction . I think it's fine as an option for those who like it, but every other 3D app I've seen, including map editors, games, and visualizations, all default to no roll on the camera. The only exception is flight simulators, and I don't really need to do barrel rolls when I'm modelling. I don't feel like the camera roll is intuitive either. In real life, you are very rarely standing on your head or standing with your body tilted to the side at a 60 degree angle. If you're sculpting or building, you are usually standing up, walking around an object, looking at it from the sides, top, and bottom. You don't really need to stand on your head or lie on your side to get a different view.

[Anthony]

The truth is that Blender used to behave exactly like wings when you rotated the view with the MMB (when you had turntable instead of trackball selected). It used to be that way up until 2.23. I really miss this, and it shouldn't have been changed, in my opinion.

The only way to get the same functionality back is to put the cursor at the screen's center before you start to rotate. But the code was there, so if someone takes a look at the 2.2 source to see how it was done, we might get it back.

[oin]

Not exactly the same.Center gets slightly repositioned as u rotate.

I'm -among other things- an organic modeller, and when moedlling a character(with Silo, Zbrush, Wings3d, etc), is important that the axes keeps in the center, and the z axe wont start to roll unexpectedly sooner or later...

grab Wings (I allways have the last one) and check your self, look at the axe center...it stay steady in center, and z axe (y in most softwares) wont roll unless you want. Besides, I select a face or a vert, or several , shift a, and that becomes my new center of rotation.(this last is not a thing that Blender can't do, i just mention it)

[osxrules]

I didn't want to post another thread about this as I'm sure there are a few so I thought I'd add to this one. Sorry that it's a few months old but I've just come to realize the frustration this causes. It definitely takes more clicks to position something the way I want than with other apps.

Everytime I heard people say about locking the axis to one rotation as a solution, I thought that meant you could only rotate around one axis at a time and I certainly never wanted that because I like being able to rotate in more than one direction. But that's not what happens in all the other 3D apps I've seen.

All it needs is to have a fixed axis orientation as people have said. Not a fixed axis position obviously because we still want to use local mode (numpad-dot).

This ensures that mmb left to right rotates around the up-axis, which is always aligned to a line running vertically up and down the screen but positioned at the active pivot (numpad-0). mmb up and down rotates around an axis that is aligned with a line running horizontally across the screen but again positioned at the active pivot. mmb moved diagonally will move both around the up axis and the horizontal axis.

But now you say, there lies the problem with turntables as implemented in other apps because you can't tilt the display clockwise or anti-clockwise - that would be rotating around a line going into the screen positioned at the active pivot. Well, surely all you need to do is to have either a slider (like a scroll bar) or a small vertical area at one side of the window where if you click mmb and drag up or down in it, it will tilt your window clockwise or anti-clockwise.

That way you get the stability of a turntable plus the functionality of the current Blender implementation. The only downside is that you can't tilt and rotate at the same time but that's what causes the frustration in the first place.

[ysvry]

z is up in normal maths too at least in europe it is. so keep it that way i was always anoyed with max doing it the otherway.