3D Mouse
Navigation Style: The 3D Mouse provides two main navigation styles:
• Camera Walkthrough: Moving the puck moves the viewport's camera as though you were moving the camera itself. Pushing the puck to the right moves the camera to the right, and thus the scene appears to move to the left, similarly to playing a first-person video game.
• Object Orbit: Moving the puck moves the viewport's camera so that you seem to be moving the item in the view. Pushing the puck to the right moves the camera to the left, thus making it appear that the object is moving to the right. Twisting the puck rotates the camera around the object, as though the object was spinning around in front of you. The center of rotation is determined by the blue dot, called Auto Rotation Center, which appears at the center of the viewport when you start manipulating the puck. If the item under the dot fills more than 80% of the view, the blue dot represents a point on the surface of the model that is tracked in 3D space until you release the puck, at which point the blue dot returns to the center of the viewport when you touch the puck again). If less than 80% of the view is filled with the object, the object's bounding box center is used as the center of rotation.
Orthographic View Style: The following options are available to set for orthographic view.
World Space: The translation axes of the puck move in world space, irrespective of the current orthographic view. Thus, pushing left or right on the puck always moves on the world X axis, even if the orthographic view is showing the left or right (and in which case you won't appear to see any movement, since you're moving perpendicular to the view). Â Best used/demonstrated with the Model Quad view.
Screen Space- The translation axes move relative to the current view: x20left/right moves on the horizontal axis, and up/down moves in the vertical axis. Pushing in/out changes the view's zoom.
Screen Space (Swap Y and Z Axes)- Pushing the puck left/right moves left/right just like in Screen Space mode, but pushing the puck forward/backward moves the screen up/down, while pulling up/down zooms in and out. Basically, the Y and Z axes are swapped.
Use Modifiers to Toggle Styles: When enabled, holding down Alt toggles between the two navigation styles. Similarly, holding down Shift and Ctrl toggle between the two Orthographic View Styles.
Speed: This is a global speed modifier, a scaling value applied to the 3D mouse's input values to make the mouse move faster or slower. This is not capped to 100%, so you can set it higher if you want it to go faster.
Swap Y and Z Axes: This option switches the Y axis with the Z axis, useful for people who think of the screen as lying on a desk (usually CAD/architecture users), as opposed to those who think of the screen as vertical (usually video-centric users).
Focus on Viewport Under Mouse: When enabled, the 3D mouse movement applies to whichever viewport the mouse cursor is currently over. If disabled, you must first interact with the viewport by clicking in it with the mouse or by rolling the mouse wheel, before the 3D mouse switches focus. This is indicated by the orange color of the Thumb. In both cases, if the mouse is not over a view that can accept 3D mouse input, the last view that can accept such input continues to get input.
Lock Horizon: Maintains a level horizon when navigating (this is different than just disabling the Z axis rotation).
Lock Axes
Dominant Axis Only: Only the axis that has the most force applied to it is used, all others remain idle. This is useful if you only want to move on one axis at a time, but don't want to have to keep toggling the Lock buttons.
Invert Axes
Invert All Axes: A simple script that toggles the state of all of the Invert buttons. There are similar scripts (and buttons) to lock all the translation or rotation axes.
Advanced: Thresholds
Translation/Rotation Threshold: The 3D mouse has a range of 0-100%. Thresholds allow you to require a certain amount of force on an axis before it registers as movement. If set to 10%, you need to push the mouse harder before you see any movement, at which point the remaining 10%-100% range is expanded to be the new 0%-100% range.
TIP: If you're a new user, this may help to avoid accidentally moving on multiple axes at once, and can be thought of as training wheels. However, it also can make the puck feel unresponsive due to the extra force required to see any movement, and may keep you from becoming proficient at controlling multiple axes at once. Mostly, you should leave these at 0%.
Advanced: Speeds
Translation/Rotation Speed: Per-axis speeds, should you want to change the speed of an individual axis. The global speed control is applied on top of these values.
Advanced: Non Linearity
Global Exponent Multiplier: Globally scales the non-linear exponents in the same way that the global speed scales all speeds. So, it provides an easy, high-level way to further adjust all of the exponents at once.
Translation/Rotation Exponent: Determines the non-linearity of the 3D mouse movement. The original linear implementation made it difficult to do both well-controlled small movements and larger movements. With non-linearity, more of the 0-100% input range of the 3D mouse is used for fine control, but coarse control is still available by simply pushing the puck further.
Drop Mappings
The Drop Mapper options allow users to change the order of drop actions relative to each other within specific modifier combos. This effectively allows different drop actions to be assigned to different modifier combos during a drag and drop operation. It is meant mainly for plug-in developers and advanced users wishing to further customize MODO for specific tasks.
The Drop Mapper is just a list of all possible modifier combos plus “unmodified". Each combo contains all possible drop actions (as identified by tags on the drop servers; more on that later), as we can’t know which actions may be available for a given drop. You can drag and drop (D&D) to re-arrange both the combos and the actions relative to each other (combos to combos and actions to actions). You can also move an action to the “never map” section to indicate that it will never be available on this modifier combo.
For example, the “Copy Files” drop action for the “File to File System” drop server is never allowed on an unmodified drop, so if you D&D a file inside its own parent directly in the Preset Browser you will not appear to be able to drop it, as no actions match the input; instead, you’ll have to hold CTRL to copy it.
When you move the mouse during D&D, the list of drop actions that match the current source and destination is built as normal. The code then loops through the first combo in the drop mapper and tests each action within in order against the current D&D actions. Once a match is found, it is assigned that modifier combo and we move on to the next combo, and so on. The order of the combos and the order of the actions inside the combos determines which action gets associated with which combo first.
Viewport Overrides: Viewport overrides provide a way to change the order of the actions on a per-viewport basis, as well as excluding them from a viewport entirely. If an action isn't shown in a viewport's override, it falls back to the global mappings (meaning, those when the "Viewport Overrides" popup is set to "(none)"). When the Source Filter is on, only actions related to the that source are shown.
To add a viewport override, click the "(add action)" entry to open a popup and choose one. Disabled entries indicate that they are already used on in this combo. To remove a viewport override, click the "x" badge on the right of its row.
The override actions in a combo can be re-arranged just like normal actions. Note that combos cannot be reordered the an override; they are always in the same global order.
Source Filter: The Source Filter allows you to show only actions that apply to specific drop sources. Since usually only one source type is being dragged at a time, this will limit the list of actions to just those that may show up in the popover together, although depending on the specifics of the source only a subset of those may be shown.
Making Actions Available For Mapping
To show up in the drop mapper, we need to know what actions are available. This is done via the new LXsDROP_ACTIONNAMES tag on the drop server. The format is simple enough:
“1@myAction1 2@myAction2”
So, it’s a space-delimited list where each entry consists of an action code, the “@“ character, and the message name. The message is looked up from a message table with the same name as the server. The action code is the arbitrary number the server passes to ILxAddDropAction::AddAction() when their ILxDrop::ActionList() method is called.
Currently only the "File to File System" drop sever defined by the Preset Browser implements these server tags. Any servers that don’t have these tags are only selectable from the dropover.
Performing Drops With Modifiers
Modifier keys can be used to change drop actions from both within the dropover and without.
From the Dropover: The droppover now displays the modifier keys associated with an action, as well as “(unmodified)” for the default drop (not the best name, I admit; maybe “default” would be better). If you keep the mouse still and hit modifier keys, you’ll change the currently-selected action, although you can also choose the current action by mousing over it (whichever is done most recently is the one that’s chosen, although it’ll be tricky to use modifiers from here with a tablet; I’ll have to add a few pixels of hysteresis).
Without the Dropover: You can of course use modifiers outside of the dropover as well, but you don’t get any feedback. If the new opal fixes drag imagery on Windows and allows us to change the imagery during the drag, I'd like to draw some text describing the current drop action at the bottom near the mouse pointer, similar to what happens when you drag around files in Explorer in Windows 7/8. This should make it much more obvious as to what the drop is going to do.
