Hi Michael,

I want to make a proposal of behaviour for switching from 2D to 3D. I know this from Turbocad find this very practical.

When being in 2D like Front, RIght and so on, I can make operations like scale and pan with the middle mousebutton but to go in 3D I must use the 3D button from menu.

My proposal is, being in the 2D UI and using the right mousebutton, the UI should switch to 3D.

RUdl

Hi Rudl - I'm sorry I don't quite understand what you mean here.

Are you talking about panning the view using the middle mouse button? That works in either a 2D view or the 3D view.

Or are you talking about rotating the 2D view so that it no longer becomes 2D ? That would tend to cause problems because then the button labeled "Top" would no longer actually go to a top view, if you could rotate the top view to some other angle it would basically make that button telling a lie.. If you want to rotate to some arbitrary angle then that's what the 3D view is for.

It is possible to set up some shortcuts so that you could stay inside the 3D view at all times but push a key to align the 3D view to the top, front, or right directions - let me know if you are interested in that.

- Michael

Hi Rudl - I'm not really familiar with TurboCAD. Does TurboCAD have the concept in it of a "split" view where you have a top, front, right, and 3D view all showing on the screen simultaneously?

If it doesn't have that and instead you're always working in just one big view, then you could get that same kind of behavior in MoI by always working in the 3D view.

In MoI when you use those view buttons on the bottom toolbar (the ones that say Split/3D/Top/Front/Right) you're not just switching one window's view around, you're actually switching to different active viewports, and when you're in split view you see all 4 viewports on the screen at the same time.

The 3D view is the one that allows the view to be rotated to any arbitrary view angle, so if you want to do view rotation then you will want to be working in that view and not in one of the 2D viewports. The 2D viewports are intentionally restricted to be 2D views only.

It is possible to do something like stay inside the 3D view and set up some shortcut keys that move the 3D view's viewing angle to some particular locations like looking straight down like the top view, etc... - working that way might resemble what you are used to in TurboCAD a bit more if it only works with a single viewport.

- Michael

..................Or are you talking about rotating the 2D view so that it no longer becomes 2D ? That would tend to cause problems because then the button labeled "Top" would no longer actually go to a top view, if you could rotate the top view to some other angle it would basically make that button telling a lie.. If you want to rotate to some arbitrary angle then that's what the 3D view is for..............

That is it.

In this moment I use the right mousebutton to rotate in 2D the window is changed to 3D and the the windowbutton must be changed to "3D" button. It should not be possible in splited window.


..........It is possible to set up some shortcuts so that you could stay inside the 3D view at all times but push a key to align the 3D view to the top, front, or right directions - let me know if you are interested in that.......

I think, this would be the same.

RUdl

Hi Rudl,

> It should not be possible in splited window.

The problem is that when you're in the maximized Top view, you are actually in the same Top view that you see in the 1/4 of the screen when in Split view.

Those are the same viewports - I don't think it would be good for the top view to behave differently depending on whether you were in split view or whether you had that particular view maximized - it's much easier in operation if one viewport behaves the same whether it is maximized or showing in split mode.

In Rhino I had things set up where you could rotate a 2D viewport around, and it tended to cause a lot of problems because it was fairly easy to do something like rotate the top view by a few degrees accidentally and then you have a view which is labeled "Top" but actually has some other skewed view in it. I wanted to avoid that problem in MoI, so in MoI the 2D views are restricted to always be a plan view (although they can be a plan view of a custom cplane if you set a cplane) so that you know for sure that the view that says "Top" is really what it says it is.


If you want to have more of a single window behavior then staying always in the 3D view should give you that kind of behavior.

If you do that then you may want to set the view to a parallel projection instead of perspective so that when you view from the top it will be like the 2D views. To do that go to Options > View > 3D view projection, and set "3D view projection: Parallel". You'll probably want to save off a 3DM file that has the 3D view set that way and then set that 3DM file as the startup template under Options > General, so that you'll then get a parallel view by default when you first launch MoI. If you have a startup template specified then MoI will read the viewports and styles from that file when it first launches or when you do File > New.

Then see this discussion thread for how to set up some keyboard shortcuts that change the 3D view direction to specific locations like same as the Top view:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2104.3

- Michael

This remembers me something, i dont know were i saw it but there is a vague idea in my mind of that. The idea is that when you, for example, hold shift while orbiting in 3D, the camera snaps to the parallel views (front, right, etc) this could be a very intuitive way of changing views.

Hi Ed,

> The idea is that when you, for example, hold shift while orbiting
> in 3D, the camera snaps to the parallel views (front, right, etc)
> this could be a very intuitive way of changing views.

That could be interesting, but I can think of a couple of problems.

One is that shift + right drag is already used as an alternate way to do panning in the 3D view, that's to be compatible with Rhino and also to help out people who are using a 2 button mouse that has no middle scroll wheel in it.

The other problem is that just aligning the view by itself doesn't quite do the whole job if you end up with a view where you're looking directly at the edge of the construction plane. So it probably needs to set both the view and the construction plane together.

Maybe something more like just tap shift after you have already started rotating...

- Michael

I said shift cause it was the first thing that came to my mind and... I agree with you, the view is not the only thing that has to be aligned. I like your idea of pressing a key while rotating. If that can be done it will be very welcome!

Hi Michael,

one thing that I would find usefull, is to be able select or choose any of the top, front or side "cplane" while in the 3D viewport. Of course this is without having to create a cplane manually each time. Maybe some kind of script assign to a shortcut key might do it if it doesn't already exist.

Thanks,
Felix

Hi Felix, yeah it is possible to set up some scripts on keyboard shortcuts that will flip the cplane to the Front or Right one while you are in the 3D viewport.

Check out this message for the scripts to use:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2008.2

Also a related thing is a script to set the cplane to be aligned with the current angled view direction of the 3D viewport's camera:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2599.4

- Michael