I am continuing with my trial, and like Moi so far - its lovely.

I am running it under emulation on both Parallels and VMFusion. Works great on both so far, but the space navigator does not work well. I am having slightly better results with VMfusion in so much as it recognizes the drivers more easily than Parallels, but both are very, very jerky when used, and frankly are not usable. I have spoken with Connexion and they do not support emulation and have no plans to at present.

So, as I dont have a PC (and before I start partitioning my mac with bootcamp etc), I was wondering how other peoples experience of the space navigator is with Moi in a native window environment? Is it as smooth and fast using the mouse / pen? I have been looking at the mac beta of Rhino and the space navigator control in that is lovely, smooth and very intuitive (and is a great combo with a tablet) - is Moi like this in windows native?

Thanks for your help,

Chris.

Hi Chris, you can get a kind of slowdown effect in native Windows if you do something a bit spastic-ish like quickly jiggle the mouse pointer all around the screen a bunch while you are also zooming around with the Space Navigator. If you don't squiggle the mouse at the exact same time then you get smooth movement.

I'm not entirely sure why that is, it may have something to do with MoI giving more visual feedback on mouse movements than Rhino does - for example when you move the mouse around in MoI for selecting things the item that is currently under the mouse highlights so that you can see what will happen if you click.

Anyway, it shouldn't be a particularly big issue since that is kind of awkward to move the mouse a whole lot while also zooming around a bunch right at that same time... When you want to zoom around just don't twitch the pointer around all over the place.

If under VMWare you are seeing jerky movement while just zooming around and not jiggling the mouse at the exact same time, then no that is not something that you would see under native Windows.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,

I'll have a go at investigating it in native.

As a matter of interest - do you use a space navigator generally when using Moi, or or do tend to navigate in a different way?

Chris.

Hi Chris,

> As a matter of interest - do you use a space navigator
> generally when using Moi, or or do tend to navigate in
> a different way?

I have one over here but I've never really gotten in the habit of using it myself - I just use the mouse: right drag to rotate, middle drag to pan, scroll wheel to zoom, and the Reset button on the viewport toolbar for fitting the selected objects to the screen. Occasionally a zoom area on that toolbar for zooming on to a particular point on an object.

- Michael

Michel,

I've had a go at native, and I now understand what you mean about

"If you don't squiggle the mouse at the exact same time then you get smooth movement."

Now you say that should not be a problem - for me it is, and I suspect for any one else who uses a tablet setup with a space navigator. As you don't use this set up for yourself, I'll try to explain what I mean: when using a pen on a tablet you naturally hold the pen over the tablet at rest in your right hand when using the SN in your left. Because the pen is hand held, there are small movements in ones hand, causing the cursor to move slightly on the screen. This obviously means the mouse is moving at the same time as the SN - so we have jerky movements.

If you haven't tried this type of set up - I recommend you see how it works/feels in Rhino - its a very nice way to interact with the computer in 3d space - I find it much more natural than clicking with a traditional mouse. Also as a user who has had problems with RSI in the past, switching over to a tablet has made a big difference. And adding in a SN to 3d navigation means I don't have to hover my left hand over the keyboard all the time (something that is a pain in Modo) and a bit uncomfortable. I find it speeds up workflow, and I don't nudge geometry by mistake - which I often do when navigating with the pen and keyboard.

So, for me to use Moi I either loose the tablet and use the SN or loose the SN and use a tablet with Modo type navigation on the keyboard.

I am writing this, as I think what I have seen of Moi so far is really great, and I am just pointing out the benefits of the SN and tablet together as I think this would be great for Moi's next release, but clearly I have no concept of how complicated that is to achieve. So I leave those thoughts with you, and I'd be interested to hear what you think.

For anyone that's interested I've looked back at this behavior in VMfusion and Parallels - and both have the same characteristics as displayed in native. The problem with emulation so far seems to be that the driver is often not recognized and has to be re-loaded. VMfusion seems to be better so far at recognizing the driver without having to load it all the time.

All the best,

Chris.

Hi Chris, I did a bit of testing and I did confirm that the herky-jerky type behavior in MoI is indeed due to the dynamic feedback that MoI gives you on every mouse move, like when you hover your mouse over a curve for example it highlights with a glow around it.

When this happens concurrently with the space navigator changing the view all the time, it makes for a lot of additional calculations happening which produces the stuttering. It can be less pronounced when in Split view mode (with 4 viewports tiled on the screen) since the smaller window size in split view mode involves reading back less data from the video card on every mouse move.

Rhino does not have that kind of additional highlight feedback on just moving the mouse over objects, so that is one reason why you see different behavior in Rhino.


I think this is fixable in MoI though, I think it should not be too difficult to figure out some kind of throttling strategy to do something like ignore mouse moves (or only use 1 per second or something like that) while the space navigator is being used to manipulate the view. I should be able to make that happen in v3, I've added it to my todo list.

Thanks,
- Michael

Hi Michael,

I have also noticed this slight jerking movement using the Spacenavigator, but didn't think it was a MoI thing so I live with it, it's not bad but as Chris mentions it is smoother with other applications.

The reason for using a 3D Mouse is so you can manipulate the model while picking objects at the same time and if you can improve on this in V3 then it would be very welcomed and the workflow would be less distracting.

Cheers