Free Rotation Mode in Aven

[Lev Bishop]

On Mon, 27 May 2002, Olly Betts wrote:

> This sounds like it would be better addressed by fixing tilt-up and tilt-down
> in aven so that they don't temporarily pause auto-rotation.  There's no good
> reason why it doesn't work the same way.

My first reaction to this was "there isn't a tilt-up or tilt-down key in
aven" but having played a bit I see there is, you just need to left
click somewhere in the graphics area before they'll work (the same thing
goes for all the keyboard commands actually). A bug, I guess. Playing a
bit more I see that it only happens with .3d files loaded by double
clicking them, or, equivalently, on the aven command line. Otherwise, I
agree, not pausing auto rotation would be the best solution.

> It's also occured to me that it would be more natural to have tilt and rotate
> on the same mouse button, rather than zoom and rotate together.  Usually I
> find I want to zoom on a given view, and the slight changing in bearing from
> "mouse wobble" is annoying.

I think so.

>  That would give an effect somewhat like
> free-rotation mode, but probably with a more natural feel.

Playing a bit more with free rotation mode I've worked out, I think, that
it does almost the same thing as pro/e's rotation scheme, the only
difference being that the left-right rotation sense is reversed compared
to pro/e. I expect the free-rotation mode would be more natural if you
flipped the sense, though it then wouldn't match with the way aven works
in elevation mode.

One more thing I just noticed is that pressing the windows key when aven
is active causes zooming out as well as the usual windows key functions.

Lev

(Dell Inspiron 4100 Laptop, Windows XP Home, Aven 1.0.7)