Not sure I get it. The main appeal of working in Blender is that you DON’T have to manually select everything with the mouse as in most other packages. The fact that everything is bound to the keyboard is Blender’s greatest strength. It’s better to lose a few people who can’t be bothered to learn the shortcuts than to have a glut of new users with poor navigation habits, IMO. If you start using Blender by selecting everything with the mouse manually, that will eventually just turn into the sentiment that Blender is confusing and broken further down the line because you never bothered to learn to use the strengths to your advantage.
I think it’s more a case of just being difficult to navigate with a trackpad than the hotkeys being difficult.
What’s the deal with the animosity towards new users anyway? You guys all wake up on the wrong side of the bed today or something?
Personally I really hate those buttons in C4D and Modo, I’d turn them off if I knew how. If they do get added to Blender some time in the future I would like the ability to hide them.
I hope that people don’t see this as a petition to change the current navigation system in Blender, what I wanted is just more accessibility.
I’m sorry, but I fail to see why people find this feature useless… I work 90% of the time with laptops with trackpads, and like I said, it’s pretty much impossible to work with Blender.
Again, I think it would be better to be able to fully navigate in the viewport without the keyboard.
I’d love to see this happen, especially as in the modo example where it overlays the view. Unobtrusive, but much easier to make sense of then adding more buttons to the already cluttered toolbar at the bottom.
Add an option to turn it on or off and the people who hate it don’t even need to see it, while it can be really helpful to newbies and people with trackpads. It would be a win-win for everyone.
Making more things available to the mouse doesn’t do anything to take away keyboard shortcuts. It makes it easier for newcomers to discover stuff, and doesn’t affect the pros who are using keybinds.
The main problem here is blender is designed around “one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse” so it’ll be very difficult to learn how to be efficient without taking this into account.
So, “one hand on the keyboard” hitting <shift>, <ctrl>, <alt> in various combinations with “one hand on the mouse” using the touchpad scroll thing to perform all the 3dview navigation you could want – except the trackball MMB one which is kind of difficult on a laptop…but not impossible.
There’s always the option of going out and spending a dollar on an external mouse as well.
The worst part of working on a laptop (strangely enough the trackpad navigation never bothered me) is using the number pad keys since you have to hit <fn> + any modifier key + take your hand away from the mouse to hit one of the simulated number keys. Bothered me so much that it was the motivation behind the original pie menu script to turn that into one key press + swipe + click (remember, ‘one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse’) to completely replace the number pad for view navigation.
(as an aside, I currently have two laptops I use on a regular basis and they have <ctrl> and <fn> swapped… WTF?)
Anyhoo, now I’m just rambling on about the trials and tribulations of us poor laptop users…
Exactly.:yes:
To be honest, thats news to me. I also completely disagree with it being an appeal. Most apps I have used have some button to function option associated with them or the ability to create such. I also disagree that having hotkeys all over the place (to the point where they are running out of hotkeys) is a strength. Theres very little good to be had when you have to be a keyboard contortionist just to reach menus and functions, which change depending on the window the mouse is over. The whole process is entirely convoluted and far from being optimal.
Maya is far more complex than blender by far, and yet nearly everything is available at the push of one button and menu system. Your hand rarely has to migrate away from the lower left corner nor does the user need to constant look down to do odd 3 key combos just to get something to appear. I think a strength is when the user doesnt have to break their thought or immersive process just to twist their fingers around get something via keyboard. Theres a bit too much of this with Blender. It is in part why I think the pie menus are a huge push in the right direction.
Good interfaces allow both the visual selection of functions and menus, as well as the hidden means to access them. Whats also key is consistency, which I find doesnt exist between modes.
I hate stuff like that. My new computer has the Windows key where my old keyboard had the alt key, so for like a month I kept opening that stupid Windows 8 Metro thing when trying to select an edge-loop.
On a keyboard I’m familiar with I type 120+ wpm, you swap it with virtually any other keyboard and I’ll immediately drop to like 80 or 90 wpm with super poor accuracy for a month or two. For something so dependent on muscle memory to operate efficiently I don’t get why every manufacturer feels the need to make unnecessary adjustments to it all the time.
Anyway, totally off topic, but keyboards really rustle my jimmies. :mad:
You keep misrepresenting this as some sort of accessibility issue. There is none. There are plenty of ways to make the viewport navigable with just the mouse. For instance, you could put selection on LMB and pan on RMB (who needs the cursor all the time, anyway?).
What you really want is to change the default of Blender to include another (in my opinion superfluous) UI element. Apparently, there isn’t strong support for that and you could just accept that.
You need mouse or some kind of pointing device to travel to those icons, then press mouse button and move mouse.
It’s easier to assign those functions in mouse buttons and use them directly on view, since you don’t have to keep going between icons and 3D model you are working on. I have set up middle button for rotation, wheel for zooming and shift+middle button for panning. You only need to press one key on keyboard, not that bad. I guess(?) you can also free the mouse button for 3D cursor for better use, but I’m not sure about it.
I agree completely.
While agree these viewport options can be helpful for new users, I too find them a bit distracting and not efficient at all to use. I am not opposed to having them, so long as they’re able to be disabled. However, in the mean time the script that @ideasman42 posted works perfect. Just paste the text into Blender’s text editor and press ALT+P.
You mentioned you work on a laptop most of the time, in which case I recommend you just enable “Emulate 3-button Mouse”. I find this to be one of the most useful features of Blender, yet many people tend to forget about it. With Emulate 3-button Mouse enabled you can rotate the view with ALT+Click and Drag, zoom the view with CTRL+ALT+Click and Drag, and you can pan the view with ALT+SHIFT+Click and Drag.
Personally I find that far more efficient than constantly moving the cursor to a corner of the view and away from my current task.
So you can assign anything to mouse buttons. This is great, when did this happen? I have now this setting: LMB - select, RMB - rotate view, MMB - move view, wheel - zoom, ctrl+RMB - set 3D cursor.
Thanks for the suggestions JonathanW, but I still think that is too keyboard intensive, I imagine that for seasoned users it’s fine, but for new users it’s painful.
If Blender implements it, with an option to disable (just for you seasoned users :)), it would be perfect.
From a development perspective (not Blender specific): You need an even better argument to have an option for something than for just having something. Options raise the entropy in a system, making it less maintainable and the code less readable. If you want to see a prime example of something growing to absurd proportions, look at the viewport code.
Something like this, can’t hurt anyone :):
I think it’s not big enough. Without that orange arrow, people might overlook it, especially those who only use a single viewport in fullscreen, on a large monitor.
Sarcasm aside, while I do think it’s visually appealing, I wouldn’t want it in my viewport (even if it was smaller).
Neither would I.