Need 'Orbit around Center of Gravity' or at least 'center of volume'

[MarqueIV]

Title says it all.  You really need the ability to rotate around the center of an object's gravity or at least it's dimensions.  Take the case of a simple torus, or 'donut'.  There's nothing in the center so unless you have a plane in the center, there's no way to set the center point for the object, and creating a plane just to rotate around it is ridiculous.  It's even worse with 'U' shaped objects.

Please implement this.  This is kinda killing me.

[kb9ydn]

10000000x YES!

Using some arbitrary point in the middle of the screen is just dumb because every time you pan the orbit reference point changes with respect to the object you're orbiting.  This makes the orbit behavior less predictable and more confusing.

C|

[roambotics_scott]

Adding 10^10x as well.

No matter what else you're doing, you've gotta navigate around.

[scottmoyse]

And it gets worse when in Perspective mode!!! But a Fusion team employee decided to archive my idea on that one... even though it's one of the best features of 3D navigation in Inventor.

[roambotics_scott]

Someone should crack open the source code for Open Inventor because SGI had scene manipulation solved in the '90s.

I kinda think what's going on is that they're monkeying with camera parameters to fake the zoom in / out and doing some kind of weird kludgy transforms rather than properly rotating the camera around any point (never mind a specific center of gravity).

I used to run into something that felt like gimbal lock and now / instead I just get weird / unnatural behavior that feels like something is getting wound up. I've not looked at the source code so I could be way off base here but I still kinda suspect that internally things are represented as Euler (roll-pitch-yaw) angles or some other unstable representation of rotations.

ADers - if that's the case, you can fix that part just by switching to quaternions (though either way, you still need to change the center of rotation to implement this idea).

If you are already using a stable representation, there's something wrong someplace in your implementation.

Either way, I'd really love to see the viewer rethought. Please someone have a look at how SoQtExaminerViewer/SoWinExaminerViewer works and steal it.

[Anonymous]

I'm amazed that this is even a request!  I'm writing a tutorial for students on how to use Fusion and I'm sitting here with my jaw hanging open.  Rotation around the volumetric center is the intuitive mode.  Selecting a face edge or point is far from intuitive and it actually makes the task of rotating an object much, much harder than it needs to be.  A one step process becomes a two step process unless you actually want to rotate the object in one of the available modes.

WOW!

[maritza.ga]

Hi all,

We have made some improvements to the orbiting behavior in the latest update. We find the center of mass and rotate about it. 

Please try the new behavior and let me know if you have any feedback.

Thanks,

Maritza Garcia

Fusion 360 User Experience Design

[scottmoyse]

@maritza.ga this needs to be implemented within the 3Dconnexion driver as well please. In both Orthographic & Perspective views.

[maritza.ga]

@scottmoyse, 

We agree. You should see this improvement in a release REALLY soon. 

Thanks,

Maritza

[scottmoyse]

Excellent... @maritza.ga also environment sensitivity is missing which is something 3Dconnexion users come to expect using their devices in Inventor & Solidworks etc... off topic now though 🙂