Hello, Five-O
September 12th, 2005 by Luc-Eric - Viewed 1212 times - Popularity: 2%In the near future, XSI Five-O will be released, and I thought I’d start using this space to publish some tips and tricks about the current version, and the new features we’ve been working on for Five. Today, Alt navigation.
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In XSI 5.0, there is a little bit of everything for everyone, sometimes in unobvious ways. For example, we have added camera and view navigation on the ALT key, which users of other software are used to.
This is not necessarily something that users could have achieved with key mapping, because there are implications to taking away key from list of available modifiers, and the existing navigation tools may need some tweaking.
The first thing we did benefits all users: we unified navigation tools by making the “S” key available in all 2D views. Previously, users often had to use the “Z” key in 2D views, and the “S” key in 3D views. Some views like the compositing-related ones already supported the “S” key.
The 3D viewport “S” key, however, doesn’t have the same mouse button mapping as Maya. This mapping is already available in XSI 4.x, however, it can be switched in the user preference page. The setting is under Tools, Camera, and it is called “Alternate Mouse Mapping”.
In some cases, using Alt to navigate the camera conflicts with existing use of the Alt modifier. To get a context menu, instead of Alt+RMB (”right mouse button”), it is CTRL+ALT+RMB. This was already supported because under Linux the window manager sometime mapped Alt+RMB to dragging windows. A couple of commands like Pivot editing inside tools, weld point (inside the Move Point tool), and range and loop selection have been made available also as separate commands, instead of being available solely through the use of the Alt modifier. This is also a benefit to all users, because it makes more commands that can be bound to user-defined hotkeys.
In the next few weeks, I’d like to talk about the new Keying Panel, and unexpected bonus XSI users get from our development of items such as the QWERTY keymaps, and more.
