It would be great to be able to rotate the model around places of interest. In UG/NX and other cad systems including Blender you can rotate around an area, either where you are currently zoomed into, or by picking a point or curve or by placing the cursor near a particular place on the model and waiting a couple of seconds. This last one is how NX does it, and its just a blessing. You basically zoom into an area of interest and then middle click on the model’s surface while holding the button down. after a couple of seconds the pointer changes icon and you know that if you rotate, the center of rotation will be around that point. I think we could have it better by just pressing like shift, then middle click a node and rotate around that node.
It would be interesting to know if this is something that others also thing would be extremely useful while analyzing results or even choosing parts around the model to mesh.
There are different approaches to rotation center selection in 3D modeling software. For example, Abaqus has an option under right mouse button to set the center of rotation to the selected point. FreeCAD uses dynamic center of rotation (at least for some navigation styles) - it’s set to the point which your cursor shows when you press the button responsible for rotation (middle mouse button).
More generally speaking, it would be great to have an option to change the navigation style in PrePoMax.
I have to agree with you. I’m currently using blender, FreeCAD, NX and Solidworks on a regular basis to learn and do various things in PrePoMax. But others might be using only Creo or only Solidworks. You tend to specialize depending on your CAD at work or at home. So yeah, if you could adjust the navigation style in the settings window, that would be pretty cool.
Hi,
Unless I misunderstood, the feature you request is already present in PrePoMax.
If you click the middle mouse button anywhere in a region of a part, the location you picked instantly pans to the center of the screen and once you rotate the part, it rotates around the center you picked earlier. I hope this makes sense.
Cheers
That’s right, PrePoMax uses the second approach mentioned in my first reply. It seems to be more convenient than the first approach utilized by Abaqus. So likely no changes are needed in this regard but there could be an option to switch navigation styles like in FreeCAD. Especially when working on a laptop.