Suggestion: Fix orbit centre behaviour

[CarlConquilla]

Hi guys, I had a minor annoyance with trying to understand how and when Fusion decides to change the orbit centre when navigating.

I understand now that it centres to the bounding box should the entire model be in view, and the issue I had was to do with this. If I am creating a large model, and then use the timeline to edit something significantly smaller than the entire assembly, the orbit centre remains as the bounding box of the entire model instead of computing the new centre based on objects that are visible or that exist at that point in time. 

I can assume there would be a minor performance hit for calculating the bounding box centre on the start of every orbit action, but at the very least when objects are added/removed from view by either visibility toggle or timeline "scrubbing", the navigation centres should be updated since it is clear that the assembly would significantly change during these points. As a benefit, it would greatly improve navigation when editing assemblies (it would have very little benefit when starting a new file, however). 

Is this something that would help and still work as intended? Or am I understanding it wrong?

[jhackney1972]

There are two commands, on the general right click menu, that may help your orbit center problem.  I wanted to call your attention to them just in case you have not noticed or used them.  They are invaluable to me when editing as you describe.

[CarlConquilla]

Thanks for that, yes I did know about these already and they seem to work as required. I am sure you also understand my suggestion but I will just take the opportunity to clarify for anyone else that the orbit centre (or center as it appears) should update to the bounding box of visible entities (and by assumption, this would mean visible entities at that time) automatically. 

To me it is a quality of life thing that would make editing larger assemblies/longer timelines more intuitive. In my case I was using a laptop trackpad to analyse a specific part within a large assembly by hiding/isolating a couple of components in a close grouping. This was particularly difficult given the default behaviour and after some research I believe that fixing this could be a very small amount of work for reasonable benefit. 

Or perhaps people simply do not have this issue? Open to more discussion?

[TrippyLighting]

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@CarlConquilla wrote:

Or perhaps people simply do not have this issue? Open to more discussion?

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IMHO a trackpad on a Mac is a wonderful, almost magic thing.

For CAD and other 3D modeling work I can get by with it for a little while, but efficient and pleasant CAD work for me and basically everyone else who has aver laid their hands on it starts with a 3D connexion space mouse. 

[CarlConquilla]

It's interesting that you mention these two devices - the apple trackpad is amazing in every way. The gestures work as expected every time, seamlessly and smoothly. Something magical about those drivers indeed, I am surprised that they are not the standard for trackpad drivers on CAD laptops.

On the other hand, my opinion is that the space mouse is somewhat a gimmick - it doesn't necessarily do more than what the orbit and pan commands can already do and takes one of your important hands away from an other important input device. I think that if the space mouse had a number pad then you could argue that it then slightly takes over the major functions of the keyboard in combination with the shortcuts/macros it can do. But otherwise I find it quite redundant unless your engineering team gets them sponsored (which is how I first tried them). That in mind I work with guys that swear by them so I don't mean to be divisive, and if you have innovative methods for using the space mouse that I am not aware of I would be interested to learn more about them.

Anyway that was a bit off topic because in my opinion there is no good UI philosophy that would endorse fixing a software problem with different hardware. And in any case it is not always in design that you navigate around a fusion model - when fabricating or putting together a large assembly you may need to "zoom in" on a part (possibly on a laptop in my case) and to my knowledge fusion doesn't yet do that correctly. It should change the orbit context to the size of the visible assembly, because orbiting around parts that aren't currently visible does not serve any real purpose.

[TrippyLighting]

My response was solely aiming to answer why others don't experience this, or don't experience it as much 😉

I was definitively not trying to dismiss the request to improve the trackpad behavior. I also work with Blender and while I also prefer to use a Mouse / Spacemouse behavior there, the trackpad behavior for orbiting and panning is much better than the equivalent in Fusion 360. There is definitely room for improvement!

In Blender it also more important than in Fusion 360 because for fast work, it very heavily relies on a vast array of keyboard shortcuts.

I've worked with 3D Connexion space mouse devices for at least 15 years. I changed companies a few times in those 15 years and and any of the many engineers  I currently work with and have worked with in the past use a 3D Connexin device. It is definitely not a gimmick and a de-facto standard device for professional CAD work.

The Spacemouse Enterprise has all sorts of configurable buttons and if non-mobile CAD work spans most of your work day, then it's a good investment!