Free Rotate + Hold Shift to Snap to 90 degree positions

Mtimmis-Personal · ‎06-25-2021

It would be really useful in Assemblies, if you could press and hold Shift to snap to 90 degree positions when rotating a component with Free Rotate. I.e. when you click and drag on the outside of the circle below.

This is something that other applications do, for example MS Office and Adobe products. If you do not press the shift button it could do the same behaviour where it rotates to any angle. But then as soon as you hold Shift whilst rotating it snaps to 90 degree position.

jan · ‎06-30-2021

Id say this has to do with the following.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-ideas/part-rotation-using-3d-mouse/idi-p/6594911

And other suggestions that I cant find right now.

As far as I can tell Shift and ctrl in an Assembly have the same function and that is to be able to select multiple parts.

What if you select multiple parts with Shift... If you then press ctrl the 3D mouse shifts its functionality away from the whole assembly and works only on the selected parts to rotate, zoom, drag and all that good stuff. Then when your done manipulating the parts with the 3D mouse you just keep ctrl pressed and press shift to make the parts snap to the nearest 90° position. Could also be done to snap to a setting where you can type in if you want to snap to 90° or maybe 45° or something else.

Also... When working with constraints it often happens that a part moves into another part so that you cant see it anymore. To remedy this I now select the part in the tree and press Free Move to get it anywhere else then hidden. Now if you could do this with the space mouse you select the part in the tree... press ctrl and now you can do all the good stuff again in one function / sweeping movement :-).