navigator support is in blender trunk

[lukep]

just to let you know that the ndof branch was committed to blender trunk today.

That means that upcoming 2.46 release will officially support the devices.

This took long because i could not work on that branch for a long time, but now it is in.

We hope to generalize in the future to all HID devices and add some features, like reduced speed for tweaking. We may add support for the 2D view modes, but I'm still not sure it is needed. There is a lot of room to increase the usefulness of the device.

Current use :
- 3 modes selected by device button1 or icon menu in 3D view :
* turntable to move the scene
* fly mode
* transform mode. The latter respect blender modes for this both in object and edit mode
- button2 toggle between dominant axis (one axis move only) and free


Lukep
Blender Os X platform manager
Ndof (navigator support)

[ettore]

Wow!
Thanks Lukep for all your support. This is really important for us and I'd like to thank you and the Blender Foundation for all the work done.

Question on future features: how about the trackball mode? If I understand it correctly, it's like turntable but with full 6DOF ?

Last but not least: like I said previously, about the generalizing for all HID devices, I have a library for OSX/Win (linux support slowly coming together too) that provides a generic NDOF device abstraction on top of the HID manager (OSX) and DirectInput (Win), if you think it could be useful let me know.

[avaktar]

I've just been playing with this. I think by default the device needs some acceleration in Blender (I've cranked it up to 2 notches from the end of the "Overall Speed" slider).

I think the best reference for how the interface should feel is that of 3DS Max, for the way the device intuitively operates within that application. It is very smooth and predictable. I think 6DOF is the right approach in Blender too.