Hello all.
While I am the originator of this thread, I don't see the point of the current discussion, since I have marked the thread as solved about 3 years ago.
The orbit behaviour in Inventor is indeed bad. But there are ways to get along with it. As I explained in one of my previous posts on this issue, I wish that Inventor actually tracked my mouse cursor and automatically pivoted the orbit around the location of the cursor as long as I hold down a mousekey.
But Inventor does not do simple. Instead there is a heavy-weight navigation bar, with a useless view cube. To get the orbit to kinda work, one has to go through menus and whatnot just to get one orbit done. Heaven forbid you need more than that.
However. It is possible to solve the issue with a mouse, keyboard of gamepad. All you need is to keybind the orbit function on your desired input device and just use the keybind instead of going through menus and such. Once the orbit tool is activated and you have the crosshairs on the view port (I cannot mention just how irritating I find the concept of the cross hairs), you click INSIDE the crosshairs circle to tie the pivot, then you can orbit. To move the desired part of the object inside the crosshair circle, you still click in the circle but in the direction of the element you want to tie the pivot to. And then you keep clicking and clicking until the element lands inside the circle. Once it's in the circle, you can orbit.
If you need to orbit the entire model, don't click in the crosshairs circle. Click and drag he vertical crosshairs (the little lines that define the vertical and horizontal of the crosshairs - do NOT confound horizontal and vertical in this context with ANY axes within the model) and your model will spin along the horizontal axis. Click and drag the horizontal crosshairs and the model will spin along the vertical axis. To rotate you current view along the normal to the crosshair circle's center, hover your mouse cursor on the crosshair circle in the area just above the right side crosshair and your mouse cursor will change into a flat circling arrow.
Another thing: keybinding pan to another key will prevent you from having to drag the crosshair by clicking in the circle to reposition the model. It's just an alternation between pan and orbit and it is fast because of the keybinds.
As a note: the whole navigation bar of Inventor is pointless but the view cube can occasionally be useful to reposition sketches. Personally I don't like to work on flat sketches, so I always misalign the skethes while I work on them, so I keep a sense of the model even while I'm working in a sketch. So I use the view cube to reposition the sketch when needed.
About keybinds: I do not use the so called 3D mouse, I actively despise it. Instead I use a roccat tyon that gives me around 30 keybinds, so I don't have to navigate the button bar when switching between line and circle, then I have extrusion, fille and chamfer tied to the mouse as well. And then, just because I like keybinds, the entire constraint section is bound to 1 out of 3 button pages on a Logitech G13. (The other two button pages are used for assemblies and for the idw creation with all dimensions, breaks, text, bubbles, symmetry lines etc.) Thus, while working in Inventor I only use the numpad on my keyboard to enter values for my parameters and the button bar is only used for tools that I don't use very often: if I need one or two mirrors and a couple of patterns for a part, then I can live with clicking the buttons in the button bar.
Also about keybinds: Inventor comes with some very specific already reserved keybinds, which I have never used. It is possible to bind the functions you need to a keyboard but you will end up needing both hands for something along the lines of ctrl+alt+shift+2 for an orbit. Not worth the hassle. But both the Logitech and the Tyon allow the user to set up macros, which makes it a lot easier to deal with this whole thing.
And, since I am still in love with the simplicity of sketchup make (2017), Autodesk could learn a whole lot about how less is a lot more. And while SketchUp cannot be called a professional CAD, like Inventor, it is a splendid tool for concept design. And.... shockingly.... it does not need a mouse click event to tie the pivot to the cursor position... there it actually knows where your cursor is and as soon as you activate the orbit tool, it just orbits around the mouse... it's... MAGIC 😛
Anyhow, I hope this helps. And sorry for being so verbose 😛
