Hi Rich,

re #1,
> Yes. I did not realize that Moi3d is designed with the separation between 3D
> and Ortho views as you describe.

Yeah the ortho views are oriented more for 2D work and also have some special 2D behavior activated when you use them instead of the 3D view. For example when you're in a 2D view you always will get an a 2D edit frame surrounding your selection in that view which you can use to quickly scale or rotate the selected objects. You'll only get that in the 3D view if the selected object is itself planar.

Also when you draw in an ortho view, the points that you pick will be projected on to a plane going through the first point that you pick, so that the drawn result is totally planar. In the 3D view points and snaps are freely placed in 3D which can be useful if you want to draw non-planar shapes. So anyway, things are generally set up that MoI assumes that when you're working in an ortho view that you are doing 2D work and has behavior to help that type of work out, and when you're in the 3D view it assumes that you're doing 3D oriented work and want to more freely place points and object rather than strictly forcing them to be planar.


> Since I almost always work in a single viewport, I was hoping that
> I could set my hotkeys up to duplicate my workflow from other programs,
> ie. top view to perspective to side view to parallel to front view etc.

It is possible to set up shortcut keys that switch between different maximized viewports with one keystroke, see here for some scripts that do that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3808.2

So if you want to just set up a shortcut key that will do the same thing as clicking on the different view modes tab buttons, the scripts shown there will do exactly that...

It would also be possible to make a combination script that would both switch to the maximized 3D view as well as set it to parallel or perspective all with one keystroke, let me know if you need help setting that up.

But yes the Top, Front, Right, and 3D viewports are all separate viewports each of which has its own settings like its own camera view and zoom factor, etc... but it's only the 3D view that can have an arbitrary view direction and can be set to a perspective projection. When you click on those buttons like "Top/Front/Right/3D", you're switching which of those viewports is the maximized one taking up the whole working area, the actual other viewports are still there but just hidden until you switch back to it or switch to split mode which shows all 4 at once.

One other note is that the Top/Front/Right ortho views can be relocated to some other frame of reference by setting a construction plane (View > CPlane) - when you set up a cplane there is an option at that time to either have the ortho views stay looking along the world axis directions, or whether they should become views that are relative to the new cplane.


> I believe what was being asked for is inherent in my request, to zoom
> to selected but not to lose rotation about selected so easily.

I thought what you were asking for previously was just a way to do the "zoom extents selected" or "zoom extents all" as different keystrokes - I'm not following this new part about differences in rotation behavior on top of that, isn't that a different thing?


> If I select something, hit reset to zoom in, rotate around the selection, make
> a pan for a slightly different view the center of rotation around the selection is
> lost and my desired selection spins out of my field of view when I again rotate.
> I then have to begin all over again.

Yeah when you pan away, the rotation pivot point pans along with you. Otherwise if it just stayed where it previously was it would be pretty easy to pan over a ways and actually have your rotation pivot point somewhere way far off of the screen from where you are currently looking at. At that point your rotation would spin really wildly since it was based off of some point that you're not even currently looking at.

Aside from using view reset, you can also place your rotation pivot to a specific location by using the Zoom Area button on the toolbar at the bottom of a viewport. That lets you pick an area to zoom into and the center point of that area can be picked with an object snap and the point you pick there will become the new rotation pivot point.

- Michael