Tilting Joint Origins (and other small UI stories)

[lure23]

The good news: one can tilt Joint origins already.  The bad news: it's hard and unintuitive.

This entry falls somewhere between 'how to use Fusion 360' and being a collection of disparate UI suggestions. It may be in the wrong forum. It may be messy. It also may be sad. ( Eeyore )

Joint origins can be tilted

Earlier, I thought joint origins could not be tilted, since their adjustment wheel only rotates around one axis, not two.

This is not true. The 'reorient' checkbox allows realigning the 'Z' and 'X' axes of the Joint origin, thus allowing some (but not fully free 3d) tilting.

The attached video shows this.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6v11ouraxqvixsd/Assembly%20-%20Joint%20origins%20can%20be%20tilted.mov

There are also many problems with this feature. It basically feels like 'click and hope' instead of allowing me to clearly and easily express my intention.

This is a collection of the problems I've faced:

Just right clicking on the JO is not enough

As usual (unfortunately) in Fusion 360, one should first select (left click) the object and then right click on it. This is not the usual UI behavior at least in programs I use.

Actually, I was wrong here. Also Keynote (my reference for OS X UI) demands one to select first, after which right click *anywhere* on the screen refers to the selected items. Fusion 360 works the same.

What makes it feel weird are some other things:

- A selected, hovered JO looks the same as an unselected, hovered JO.

   (unselected, unselected hovered, selected, selected hovered)

This means if you are right clicking while hovering above the JO, you have no idea whether it's selected or not. And since selection matters to the context menu to pop up, you have no idea whether you'll get the right one.

It is unnatural that in order to better know what's happening you should move the cursor away from the object, and right click there. 

One solution can be to change the color scheme so that a selected, hovered JO gets a unique color (similar lightness change as for the unselected one, but based on the default selected color):

- There are too many context menu items.

I was hoping I wouldn't need to bring this up here. It's a more common issue. But it really hurts in trying to get to 'edit Joint Origin'.

Context menu when there is no selection on the canvas:

I don't have anything selected. Who's material am I going to change? Where am I going to make a hole? What am I going to press/pull? This simply does not make any sense. There should not be a context menu at such state. At all. Or it can have things s.a. 'paste' (enabled if there is anything to paste to the current component, shaded if there's not); see Keynote for the lead.

Context menu when the JO was selected (notice that it looks just the same):

Here we're better off. Some of the entries make sense.

Some don't.

'Find in Window' is interesting. We're looking at the selected object. It makes equally much sense as 'Find in Browser' right-clicking the element in the browser…

I recall that Ron prefers right-clicking stuff in the Browser. I don't blame him. But this can be fixed.

Back to the JO 

Editing the JO (as well as creating one) offers these options:

'Flip' simply switches the orientation 180°. It's kind of neat but also redundant since the same could be done if only the 'reorient' feature was easier (that's why I included it in this shot).

'Reorient' tick simply enables the below two axis selections (at least I didn't find what else it would do). Therefore, also it is actually unnecessary.

Why is the Z axis before the X axis?

The real problem is in the selection of the axes (0:20 onwards in the video).

The best way I found to do was using the axis entries in the browser. This is not ideal, because I end up jumping between the browser and the dialog. I should be concentrating on the Joint origin instead! If there was a second rotating slider there, none of this would need to take place.

Selecting an axis seems to (sometimes) deselect the tool allowing the axis to get selected. So I need to jump back to the dialog…

Selecting the same axis for both 'Z' and 'X' looks possible (i.e. the browser entries don't get dimmed if a selection would be invalid). Only, nothing happens. This makes the 'click and hope' approach even a bit more challenging.

The video could be cut there. Eventually I got what I wanted (but by chance).

Why is it like this?

You have a beautiful widget for the offsets and rotations. There is no need for the 'reorient'. Just add another angle.

On the positive side, I got the Joint origin tilted.

[lure23]

It wasn't me who put those newlines there. And there's no 'edit' in IdeaStation entries. Should have put it in 'How to use' forum instead.

[lure23]

Another video.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9o3mvxh7ktqd01b/Joint%20Origins%20-%20when%20in%20a%20component.mov

Here the Joint Origin is within a component. When editing its axes (reorient):

- hovering over straight objects changes the way the JO looks. This is great (no click + hope)

- hovering over browser's X/Y/Z axes has no effect, whatsoever

A bug?

[lure23]

@keqingsong I came back to this now in 2019, and the behavior of Fusion 360 is still as described in the idea. It has been archived by you in 2015 with no comments, so I don't know if it really has gotten a good look-through or just ended up being swiped (understandable).

I still think that having two round controls (like there are three in e.g. move - screenshot attached) would make the "edit joint origin" UI more discoverable and more consistent with the rest of the Fusion 360 experience.

Multiple rotating handles in 'move'

If you think the cleanup in 2015 was the right thing, can I ask for a short description why that'd be so. If you see the request as valid, could this be unarchived?