Fine-grain rotation

George_Anderson

Is there a way to reduce the sensitivity of mouse rotation to allow getting a very finely-tuned perspective on a part?

When rotating, moving the mouse by one pixel seems to rotate the view by approximately one degree. That's a good sensitivity in general, but terrible when trying to line up exactly with something. I'm often trying to look exactly down the side of something that doesn't have any flat faces to select to go normal to with [n].

I don't see any of these options, am I missing any secret tricks?

1) Hold a modifier key to reduce the sensitivity (I think this improvement request indicates that it doesn't exist yet -- https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/5432/fine-zoom )

2) Set mouse sensitivity in Onshape options (this would make rotation annoying slow)

3) Set mouse acceleration in Onshape options -- this can also be annoying, so might not be good

alnis

Can you post a screenshot of the model you're trying to look at? Totally ok if not/if it's proprietary.

I would suggest constructing a mate connector and/or plane with the exact orientation you want, then using "normal to" with n. Not exactly a great way to do it, but it should work. Tip: you can define a mate connector on a line so that the line "spears" the mate connector in some cases where getting the view alignment right is tricky.

George_Anderson

@alnis_smidchens Thanks, I was used to using custom planes, but hadn't thought of a mate connector. I'm often trying to look down circular tubes that don't have flat face end caps. Getting a plane normal to the cylinder axis takes too many steps, but the mate connector does the right thing automatically with the cylindrical face, so that's a slight improvement in this case.

Overall, it's a bit heavy to create an object to get a view, and then you have to remember to clean them up. To get a view that's precise to say 6 decimal places, there's no way around it, but really I'm just trying to get maybe 10x the current rotation resolution.

alnis

Yeah, this definitely isn't the fastest method... if it's any extra help, shift V lets you quickly create a named view or select an existing one if you'll be returning to the same view orientation multiple times. I agree that this currently is not a very easy thing to do.

Do you think having "normal to" align the view along the axis of a selected cylinder would be helpful? If so, it might make sense to make an improvement request. I believe the current behavior is to look at the side of the cylinder, which might be useful, but maybe it's more useful to have it do something different. I'm not really sure.

George_Anderson

Yes, the named view is useful for other things, but not what I'm looking for here.

I like the idea of having normal to a cylinder face look down the axis makes a lot of sense, and perhaps more generally, anything that in FeatureScript qualifies as "QueryFilterCompound.ALLOWS_DIRECTION" -- "Equivalent to GeometryType.LINE || GeometryType.CIRCLE || GeometryType.ARC || GeometryType.CYLINDER || GeometryType.PLANE"

Significantly, if you select an edge that is a line, it could go normal to that edge. I'll consider putting in an improvement request soon.